In plain words: Instead of rewriting every weight each step, it stacks small updates touching only a narrow slice of the weights, then merges them so the network is full-strength. Training language models this way matched normal training while cutting memory and speeding it up to 40%.
Abstract
Despite the dominance and effectiveness of scaling, resulting in large networks with hundreds of billions of parameters, the necessity to train overparameterized models remains poorly understood, while training costs grow exponentially. In this paper, we explore parameter-efficient training techniques as an approach to training large neural networks. We introduce a novel method called ReLoRA, which utilizes low-rank updates to train high-rank networks. We apply ReLoRA to training transformer language models with up to 1.3B parameters and demonstrate comparable performance to regular neural network training. ReLoRA saves up to 5.5Gb of RAM per GPU and improves training speed by 9-40% depending on the model size and hardware setup. Our findings show the potential of parameter-efficient techniques for large-scale pre-training.
Vladislav Lialin, Namrata Shivagunde, Sherin Muckatira, Anna Rumshisky
arXiv:2307.05695 · cs.CL, cs.LG · submitted Jul 11, 2023 · updated Dec 10, 2023
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