SLaNC: Static LayerNorm Calibration

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Salmani, Mahsa, Trukhanov, Nikita, Soloveychik, Ilya
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2024
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author Salmani, Mahsa
Trukhanov, Nikita
Soloveychik, Ilya
author_facet Salmani, Mahsa
Trukhanov, Nikita
Soloveychik, Ilya
contents The ever increasing sizes of Large Language Models (LLMs) beyond hundreds of billions of parameters have generated enormous pressure on the manufacturers of dedicated hardware accelerators and made the innovative design of the latter one of the most rapidly expanding fields of the AI industry. Various approaches have been explored to enable efficient and accurate processing of LLMs on the available accelerators given their computational and storage limitations. Among these, various quantization techniques have become the main focus of the community as a means of reducing the compute, communication and storage requirements. Quantization to lower precision formats naturally poses a number of challenges caused by the limited range of the available value representations. When it comes to processing the popular Transformer models on hardware, one of the main issues becomes calculation of the LayerNorm simply because accumulation of the variance requires a much wider dynamic range than the hardware enables. In this article, we address this matter and propose a computationally-efficient scaling technique that can be easily applied to Transformer models during inference. Our method suggests a straightforward way of scaling the LayerNorm inputs based on the static weights of the immediately preceding linear layers. The scaling factors are computed offline, based solely on the linear layer weights, hence no latency or computational overhead is added during inference. Most importantly, our technique ensures that no numerical issues such as overflow or underflow could happen during the compute. This approach offers smooth, accurate and resource-effective inference across a wide range of hardware architectures. The article provides theoretical justification as well as supporting numerical simulations.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2410_10553
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle SLaNC: Static LayerNorm Calibration
Salmani, Mahsa
Trukhanov, Nikita
Soloveychik, Ilya
Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Computation and Language
The ever increasing sizes of Large Language Models (LLMs) beyond hundreds of billions of parameters have generated enormous pressure on the manufacturers of dedicated hardware accelerators and made the innovative design of the latter one of the most rapidly expanding fields of the AI industry. Various approaches have been explored to enable efficient and accurate processing of LLMs on the available accelerators given their computational and storage limitations. Among these, various quantization techniques have become the main focus of the community as a means of reducing the compute, communication and storage requirements. Quantization to lower precision formats naturally poses a number of challenges caused by the limited range of the available value representations. When it comes to processing the popular Transformer models on hardware, one of the main issues becomes calculation of the LayerNorm simply because accumulation of the variance requires a much wider dynamic range than the hardware enables. In this article, we address this matter and propose a computationally-efficient scaling technique that can be easily applied to Transformer models during inference. Our method suggests a straightforward way of scaling the LayerNorm inputs based on the static weights of the immediately preceding linear layers. The scaling factors are computed offline, based solely on the linear layer weights, hence no latency or computational overhead is added during inference. Most importantly, our technique ensures that no numerical issues such as overflow or underflow could happen during the compute. This approach offers smooth, accurate and resource-effective inference across a wide range of hardware architectures. The article provides theoretical justification as well as supporting numerical simulations.
title SLaNC: Static LayerNorm Calibration
topic Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.10553