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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Luo, Cheng, Zhao, Jiawei, Chen, Zhuoming, Chen, Beidi, Anandkumar, Anima
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2407.15892
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Table of Contents:
  • We introduce Mini-Sequence Transformer (MsT), a simple and effective methodology for highly efficient and accurate LLM training with extremely long sequences. MsT partitions input sequences and iteratively processes mini-sequences to reduce intermediate memory usage. Integrated with activation recomputation, it enables significant memory savings in both forward and backward passes. In experiments with the Llama3-8B model, with MsT, we measure no degradation in throughput or convergence even with 12x longer sequences than standard implementations. MsT is fully general, implementation-agnostic, and requires minimal code changes to integrate with existing LLM training frameworks. Integrated with the huggingface library, MsT successfully extends the maximum context length of Qwen, Mistral, and Gemma-2 by 12-24x.