You Don't Need All Attentions: Distributed Dynamic Fine-Tuning for Foundation Models

Fuente: arXiv
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Hauptverfasser: Ding, Shiwei, Zhang, Lan, Wang, Zhenlin, Ateniese, Giuseppe, Yuan, Xiaoyong
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2025
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author Ding, Shiwei
Zhang, Lan
Wang, Zhenlin
Ateniese, Giuseppe
Yuan, Xiaoyong
author_facet Ding, Shiwei
Zhang, Lan
Wang, Zhenlin
Ateniese, Giuseppe
Yuan, Xiaoyong
contents Fine-tuning plays a crucial role in adapting models to downstream tasks with minimal training efforts. However, the rapidly increasing size of foundation models poses a daunting challenge for accommodating foundation model fine-tuning in most commercial devices, which often have limited memory bandwidth. Techniques like model sharding and tensor parallelism address this issue by distributing computation across multiple devices to meet memory requirements. Nevertheless, these methods do not fully leverage their foundation nature in facilitating the fine-tuning process, resulting in high computational costs and imbalanced workloads. We introduce a novel Distributed Dynamic Fine-Tuning (D2FT) framework that strategically orchestrates operations across attention modules based on our observation that not all attention modules are necessary for forward and backward propagation in fine-tuning foundation models. Through three innovative selection strategies, D2FT significantly reduces the computational workload required for fine-tuning foundation models. Furthermore, D2FT addresses workload imbalances in distributed computing environments by optimizing these selection strategies via multiple knapsack optimization. Our experimental results demonstrate that the proposed D2FT framework reduces the training computational costs by 40% and training communication costs by 50% with only 1% to 2% accuracy drops on the CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, and Stanford Cars datasets. Moreover, the results show that D2FT can be effectively extended to recent LoRA, a state-of-the-art parameter-efficient fine-tuning technique. By reducing 40% computational cost or 50% communication cost, D2FT LoRA top-1 accuracy only drops 4% to 6% on Stanford Cars dataset.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2504_12471
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle You Don't Need All Attentions: Distributed Dynamic Fine-Tuning for Foundation Models
Ding, Shiwei
Zhang, Lan
Wang, Zhenlin
Ateniese, Giuseppe
Yuan, Xiaoyong
Machine Learning
Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing
Performance
Fine-tuning plays a crucial role in adapting models to downstream tasks with minimal training efforts. However, the rapidly increasing size of foundation models poses a daunting challenge for accommodating foundation model fine-tuning in most commercial devices, which often have limited memory bandwidth. Techniques like model sharding and tensor parallelism address this issue by distributing computation across multiple devices to meet memory requirements. Nevertheless, these methods do not fully leverage their foundation nature in facilitating the fine-tuning process, resulting in high computational costs and imbalanced workloads. We introduce a novel Distributed Dynamic Fine-Tuning (D2FT) framework that strategically orchestrates operations across attention modules based on our observation that not all attention modules are necessary for forward and backward propagation in fine-tuning foundation models. Through three innovative selection strategies, D2FT significantly reduces the computational workload required for fine-tuning foundation models. Furthermore, D2FT addresses workload imbalances in distributed computing environments by optimizing these selection strategies via multiple knapsack optimization. Our experimental results demonstrate that the proposed D2FT framework reduces the training computational costs by 40% and training communication costs by 50% with only 1% to 2% accuracy drops on the CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, and Stanford Cars datasets. Moreover, the results show that D2FT can be effectively extended to recent LoRA, a state-of-the-art parameter-efficient fine-tuning technique. By reducing 40% computational cost or 50% communication cost, D2FT LoRA top-1 accuracy only drops 4% to 6% on Stanford Cars dataset.
title You Don't Need All Attentions: Distributed Dynamic Fine-Tuning for Foundation Models
topic Machine Learning
Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing
Performance
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.12471