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Main Authors: Chitsaz, Kamran, Fournier, Quentin, Mordido, Gonçalo, Chandar, Sarath
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2407.11722
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author Chitsaz, Kamran
Fournier, Quentin
Mordido, Gonçalo
Chandar, Sarath
author_facet Chitsaz, Kamran
Fournier, Quentin
Mordido, Gonçalo
Chandar, Sarath
contents The increasing scale of Transformer models has led to an increase in their pre-training computational requirements. While quantization has proven to be effective after pre-training and during fine-tuning, applying quantization in Transformers during pre-training has remained largely unexplored at scale for language modeling. This study aims to explore the impact of quantization for efficient pre-training of Transformers, with a focus on linear layer components. By systematically applying straightforward linear quantization to weights, activations, gradients, and optimizer states, we assess its effects on model efficiency, stability, and performance during training. By offering a comprehensive recipe of effective quantization strategies to be applied during the pre-training of Transformers, we promote high training efficiency from scratch while retaining language modeling ability. Code is available at https://github.com/chandar-lab/EfficientLLMs.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2407_11722
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Exploring Quantization for Efficient Pre-Training of Transformer Language Models
Chitsaz, Kamran
Fournier, Quentin
Mordido, Gonçalo
Chandar, Sarath
Machine Learning
The increasing scale of Transformer models has led to an increase in their pre-training computational requirements. While quantization has proven to be effective after pre-training and during fine-tuning, applying quantization in Transformers during pre-training has remained largely unexplored at scale for language modeling. This study aims to explore the impact of quantization for efficient pre-training of Transformers, with a focus on linear layer components. By systematically applying straightforward linear quantization to weights, activations, gradients, and optimizer states, we assess its effects on model efficiency, stability, and performance during training. By offering a comprehensive recipe of effective quantization strategies to be applied during the pre-training of Transformers, we promote high training efficiency from scratch while retaining language modeling ability. Code is available at https://github.com/chandar-lab/EfficientLLMs.
title Exploring Quantization for Efficient Pre-Training of Transformer Language Models
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2407.11722