LLM Distillation and Compression // Guanhua Wang // #278
Dec 17, 2024
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Guanhua Wang, a Senior Researcher in the DeepSpeed team at Microsoft, dives into the revolutionary Domino training engine, designed to eliminate communication overhead during LLM training. He discusses the intricacies of naming the Phi-3 model and the growing interest in smaller language models. Wang highlights advanced techniques like data offloading and quantization, showcasing how Domino can speed up training by up to 1.3x compared to existing methods, while addressing privacy in customizable copilot models. It's a deep dive into optimizing AI training!
High-quality, noise-free data from reputable sources is crucial for training effective language models, surpassing the effectiveness of synthetic data.
Domino optimizes LLM training by minimizing communication overhead between GPUs, enabling faster training speeds through better computation integration.
Deep dives
Innovations in Small Language Models
Creating high-performing small language models involves rigorous approaches to data quality and preprocessing. The discussion highlights the significant importance placed on using high-quality, noise-free data sourced from reputable publications like the New York Times and Forbes, which is essential for training effective models. The reliance on high-quality data is emphasized over synthetic data, as the latter is often deemed insufficient in providing the necessary variety and accuracy for model training. Furthermore, the need for customized data becomes clear during post-training to enhance overall performance.
Understanding DeepSpeed
DeepSpeed is characterized as a transformative third-party library for PyTorch, aimed at optimizing memory efficiency during model training. The introduction of the zero optimizer allows GPUs to maintain only a portion of the model's parameters, significantly improving memory utilization compared to traditional data parallel training approaches. This methodological shift not only reduces memory pressure but also enhances computational speed. Additionally, the discussion touches upon data offloading techniques that help manage GPU memory effectively, further underscoring DeepSpeed's impressive efficiency gains.
The Domino Project: Streamlining Communication
Domino represents a significant advancement in model training, designed to minimize communication overhead between GPUs during training cycles. By focusing on making communication less visible to users while it seamlessly integrates with computation, it vastly improves training speeds, reducing iteration times by hiding communication beneath compute processes. The flexibility of Domino to work with various transformer models and its capability to optimize multi-node configurations is crucial in maximizing training efficiency. Importantly, Domino’s extensive compatibility with existing frameworks and hardware ensures that it can be utilize in diverse and demanding server environments.
Exploring Quantization Techniques
Quantization emerges as a central technique discussed for improving the efficiency of model training operations across both pre-training and post-training phases. By transforming data and weight representations to lower bit formats, not only is the memory footprint reduced, but communication speeds between processing components are also enhanced. This approach leads to faster and more resource-effective training while maintaining adequate accuracy levels, particularly notable in large models with substantial data throughput demands. The conversation highlights the possibility of quantifying both communication messages and gradients, aiming for a more cohesive and synchronized training process.
Guanhua Wang is a Senior Researcher in DeepSpeed Team at Microsoft. Before Microsoft, Guanhua earned his Computer Science PhD from UC Berkeley.
Domino: Communication-Free LLM Training Engine // MLOps Podcast #278 with Guanhua "Alex" Wang, Senior Researcher at Microsoft.
// Abstract
Given the popularity of generative AI, Large Language Models (LLMs) often consume hundreds or thousands of GPUs to parallelize and accelerate the training process. Communication overhead becomes more pronounced when training LLMs at scale. To eliminate communication overhead in distributed LLM training, we propose Domino, which provides a generic scheme to hide communication behind computation. By breaking the data dependency of a single batch training into smaller independent pieces, Domino pipelines these independent pieces of training and provides a generic strategy of fine-grained communication and computation overlapping. Extensive results show that compared with Megatron-LM, Domino achieves up to 1.3x speedup for LLM training on Nvidia DGX-H100 GPUs.
// Bio
Guanhua Wang is a Senior Researcher in the DeepSpeed team at Microsoft. His research focuses on large-scale LLM training and serving. Previously, he led the ZeRO++ project at Microsoft which helped reduce over half of model training time inside Microsoft and Linkedin. He also led and was a major contributor to Microsoft Phi-3 model training. He holds a CS PhD from UC Berkeley advised by Prof Ion Stoica.
// MLOps Swag/Merch
https://shop.mlops.community/
// Related Links
Website: https://guanhuawang.github.io/
DeepSpeed hiring: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/project/deepspeed/opportunities/
Large Model Training and Inference with DeepSpeed // Samyam Rajbhandari // LLMs in Prod Conference: https://youtu.be/cntxC3g22oU
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Timestamps:
[00:00] Guanhua's preferred coffee
[00:17] Takeaways
[01:36] Please like, share, leave a review, and subscribe to our MLOps channels!
[01:47] Phi model explanation
[06:29] Small Language Models optimization challenges
[07:29] DeepSpeed overview and benefits
[10:58] Crazy unimplemented crazy AI ideas
[17:15] Post training vs QAT
[19:44] Quantization over distillation
[24:15] Using Lauras
[27:04] LLM scaling sweet spot
[28:28] Quantization techniques
[32:38] Domino overview
[38:02] Training performance benchmark
[42:44] Data dependency-breaking strategies
[49:14] Wrap up
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