In plain words: Training in 8-bit numbers is faster but breaks down on newer Transformers, whose internal values include wild outliers. The fix switches just the outlier blocks to 16-bit on the fly, keeping accuracy while speeding up training 1.57 times on an RTX 4090.
Abstract
Transformer models have achieved remarkable success across various AI applications but face significant training costs. Low-bit training, such as INT8 training, can leverage computational units with higher throughput, and has already demonstrated its effectiveness on GPT2 models with block-level quantization. However, it struggles with modern Transformer variants incorporating GLU units. This is because those variants demonstrate complex distributions of activation outliers. To address the challenge, we propose Fallback Quantization, implementing mixed-precision GEMM that dynamically falls back 8-bit to 16-bit for activation blocks containing outliers. Experiments show that our approach is robustly competent in both fine-tuning and pretraining settings. Moreover, our method achieves a 1.57x end-to-end training speedup on RTX4090 GPUs.
Pengle Zhang, Jia Wei, Jintao Zhang, Jun Zhu, Jianfei Chen
arXiv:2503.08040 · cs.LG · submitted Mar 11, 2025 · updated Jun 9, 2025
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