The Future of Large Language Model Pre-training is Federated

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Sani, Lorenzo, Iacob, Alex, Cao, Zeyu, Marino, Bill, Gao, Yan, Paulik, Tomas, Zhao, Wanru, Shen, William F., Aleksandrov, Preslav, Qiu, Xinchi, Lane, Nicholas D.
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
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author Sani, Lorenzo
Iacob, Alex
Cao, Zeyu
Marino, Bill
Gao, Yan
Paulik, Tomas
Zhao, Wanru
Shen, William F.
Aleksandrov, Preslav
Qiu, Xinchi
Lane, Nicholas D.
author_facet Sani, Lorenzo
Iacob, Alex
Cao, Zeyu
Marino, Bill
Gao, Yan
Paulik, Tomas
Zhao, Wanru
Shen, William F.
Aleksandrov, Preslav
Qiu, Xinchi
Lane, Nicholas D.
contents Generative pre-trained large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive performance over a wide range of tasks, thanks to the unprecedented amount of data they have been trained on. As established scaling laws indicate, LLMs' future performance improvement depends on the amount of computing and data sources they can leverage for pre-training. Federated learning (FL) has the potential to unleash the majority of the planet's data and computational resources, which are underutilized by the data-center-focused training methodology of current LLM practice. Our work presents a robust, flexible, reproducible FL approach that enables large-scale collaboration across institutions to train LLMs. We propose a scalable deployment system called Photon to enable the investigation and development of this new training paradigm for LLM pre-training. We show that Photon can be used by organizations interested in collaborating with their private data sources and computational resources for pre-training LLMs with billions of parameters. This paradigm would mobilize more computational and data resources while matching or potentially exceeding centralized performance. We further show the effectiveness of the federated training scales with model size and present our approach for training billion-scale federated LLMs using limited resources. Thus far, we have used Photon to train LLM models to the size of 7B parameters and anticipate larger models being completed in the near future. Finally, we show that LLM training is highly resilient to the classical challenges of federated statistical and hardware heterogeneity. Furthermore, we show that convergence is robust to partial participation, opening the avenue for compute-efficient collaborative training. Photon will help data-rich actors to become the protagonists of LLMs pre-training instead of leaving the stage to compute-rich actors alone.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2405_10853
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle The Future of Large Language Model Pre-training is Federated
Sani, Lorenzo
Iacob, Alex
Cao, Zeyu
Marino, Bill
Gao, Yan
Paulik, Tomas
Zhao, Wanru
Shen, William F.
Aleksandrov, Preslav
Qiu, Xinchi
Lane, Nicholas D.
Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing
Generative pre-trained large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive performance over a wide range of tasks, thanks to the unprecedented amount of data they have been trained on. As established scaling laws indicate, LLMs' future performance improvement depends on the amount of computing and data sources they can leverage for pre-training. Federated learning (FL) has the potential to unleash the majority of the planet's data and computational resources, which are underutilized by the data-center-focused training methodology of current LLM practice. Our work presents a robust, flexible, reproducible FL approach that enables large-scale collaboration across institutions to train LLMs. We propose a scalable deployment system called Photon to enable the investigation and development of this new training paradigm for LLM pre-training. We show that Photon can be used by organizations interested in collaborating with their private data sources and computational resources for pre-training LLMs with billions of parameters. This paradigm would mobilize more computational and data resources while matching or potentially exceeding centralized performance. We further show the effectiveness of the federated training scales with model size and present our approach for training billion-scale federated LLMs using limited resources. Thus far, we have used Photon to train LLM models to the size of 7B parameters and anticipate larger models being completed in the near future. Finally, we show that LLM training is highly resilient to the classical challenges of federated statistical and hardware heterogeneity. Furthermore, we show that convergence is robust to partial participation, opening the avenue for compute-efficient collaborative training. Photon will help data-rich actors to become the protagonists of LLMs pre-training instead of leaving the stage to compute-rich actors alone.
title The Future of Large Language Model Pre-training is Federated
topic Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.10853