Grass: Compute Efficient Low-Memory LLM Training with Structured Sparse Gradients

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Muhamed, Aashiq, Li, Oscar, Woodruff, David, Diab, Mona, Smith, Virginia
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
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author Muhamed, Aashiq
Li, Oscar
Woodruff, David
Diab, Mona
Smith, Virginia
author_facet Muhamed, Aashiq
Li, Oscar
Woodruff, David
Diab, Mona
Smith, Virginia
contents Large language model (LLM) training and finetuning are often bottlenecked by limited GPU memory. While existing projection-based optimization methods address this by projecting gradients into a lower-dimensional subspace to reduce optimizer state memory, they typically rely on dense projection matrices, which can introduce computational and memory overheads. In this work, we propose Grass (GRAdient Stuctured Sparsification), a novel approach that leverages sparse projections to transform gradients into structured sparse updates. This design not only significantly reduces memory usage for optimizer states but also minimizes gradient memory footprint, computation, and communication costs, leading to substantial throughput improvements. Extensive experiments on pretraining and finetuning tasks demonstrate that Grass achieves competitive performance to full-rank training and existing projection-based methods. Notably, Grass enables half-precision pretraining of a 13B parameter LLaMA model on a single 40GB A100 GPU--a feat infeasible for previous methods--and yields up to a $2\times$ throughput improvement on an 8-GPU system. Code can be found at https://github.com/aashiqmuhamed/GRASS .
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2406_17660
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Grass: Compute Efficient Low-Memory LLM Training with Structured Sparse Gradients
Muhamed, Aashiq
Li, Oscar
Woodruff, David
Diab, Mona
Smith, Virginia
Machine Learning
Large language model (LLM) training and finetuning are often bottlenecked by limited GPU memory. While existing projection-based optimization methods address this by projecting gradients into a lower-dimensional subspace to reduce optimizer state memory, they typically rely on dense projection matrices, which can introduce computational and memory overheads. In this work, we propose Grass (GRAdient Stuctured Sparsification), a novel approach that leverages sparse projections to transform gradients into structured sparse updates. This design not only significantly reduces memory usage for optimizer states but also minimizes gradient memory footprint, computation, and communication costs, leading to substantial throughput improvements. Extensive experiments on pretraining and finetuning tasks demonstrate that Grass achieves competitive performance to full-rank training and existing projection-based methods. Notably, Grass enables half-precision pretraining of a 13B parameter LLaMA model on a single 40GB A100 GPU--a feat infeasible for previous methods--and yields up to a $2\times$ throughput improvement on an 8-GPU system. Code can be found at https://github.com/aashiqmuhamed/GRASS .
title Grass: Compute Efficient Low-Memory LLM Training with Structured Sparse Gradients
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.17660