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Fast Inference of Mixture-of-Experts Language Models with Offloading (arxiv.org)
1 point by tosh on Dec 30, 2023 | hide | past | pdf | discuss on HN

In plain words: Instead of dragging whole layers between storage and memory, this setup fetches only the few experts each word uses, since the model activates just a small slice of itself. That lets a huge expert-based language model run on a desktop and free cloud machines.

Abstract

With the widespread adoption of Large Language Models (LLMs), many deep learning practitioners are looking for strategies of running these models more efficiently. One such strategy is to use sparse Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) - a type of model architectures where only a fraction of model layers are active for any given input. This property allows MoE-based language models to generate tokens faster than their dense counterparts, but it also increases model size due to having multiple experts. Unfortunately, this makes state-of-the-art MoE language models difficult to run without high-end GPUs. In this work, we study the problem of running large MoE language models on consumer hardware with limited accelerator memory. We build upon parameter offloading algorithms and propose a novel strategy that accelerates offloading by taking advantage of innate properties of MoE LLMs. Using this strategy, we build can run Mixtral-8x7B with mixed quantization on desktop hardware and free-tier Google Colab instances.

Artyom Eliseev, Denis Mazur
arXiv:2312.17238 · cs.LG, cs.AI, cs.DC · submitted Dec 28, 2023
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