FAS: Fast ANN-SNN Conversion for Spiking Large Language Models

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Chen, Long, Song, Xiaotian, Song, Andy, Chen, BaDong, Lv, Jiancheng, Sun, Yanan
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Chen, Long
Song, Xiaotian
Song, Andy
Chen, BaDong
Lv, Jiancheng
Sun, Yanan
author_facet Chen, Long
Song, Xiaotian
Song, Andy
Chen, BaDong
Lv, Jiancheng
Sun, Yanan
contents Spiking Large Language Models have been shown as a good alternative to LLMs in various scenarios. Existing methods for creating Spiking LLMs, i.e., direct training and ANN-SNN conversion, often suffer from performance degradation and relatively high computational costs. To address these issues, we propose a novel Fast ANN-SNN conversion strategy (FAS) that transforms LLMs into spiking LLMs in two stages. The first stage employs a full-parameter fine-tuning of pre-trained models, so it does not need any direct training from scratch. The second stage introduces a coarse-to-fine calibration method to reduce conversion errors and improve accuracy. Experiments on both language and vision-language tasks across four different scales of LLMs demonstrate that FAS can achieve state-of-the-art performance yet with significantly reduced inference latency and computational costs. Notably, FAS only takes eight timesteps to achieve an accuracy of 3\% higher than that of the OPT-7B model, while reducing energy consumption by 96.63\%. The source code is available at https://github.com/lc783/FAS
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2502_04405
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle FAS: Fast ANN-SNN Conversion for Spiking Large Language Models
Chen, Long
Song, Xiaotian
Song, Andy
Chen, BaDong
Lv, Jiancheng
Sun, Yanan
Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Computation and Language
Spiking Large Language Models have been shown as a good alternative to LLMs in various scenarios. Existing methods for creating Spiking LLMs, i.e., direct training and ANN-SNN conversion, often suffer from performance degradation and relatively high computational costs. To address these issues, we propose a novel Fast ANN-SNN conversion strategy (FAS) that transforms LLMs into spiking LLMs in two stages. The first stage employs a full-parameter fine-tuning of pre-trained models, so it does not need any direct training from scratch. The second stage introduces a coarse-to-fine calibration method to reduce conversion errors and improve accuracy. Experiments on both language and vision-language tasks across four different scales of LLMs demonstrate that FAS can achieve state-of-the-art performance yet with significantly reduced inference latency and computational costs. Notably, FAS only takes eight timesteps to achieve an accuracy of 3\% higher than that of the OPT-7B model, while reducing energy consumption by 96.63\%. The source code is available at https://github.com/lc783/FAS
title FAS: Fast ANN-SNN Conversion for Spiking Large Language Models
topic Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.04405