Archives de catégorie : Fine tuning LLM

Efficient Training Techniques for Transformers on a Single GPU

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When training Transformer models on a single GPU, it’s important to optimize for both speed and memory efficiency to make the most of limited resources. Here are some key parameters and techniques to consider:

Mixed Precision Training

  • Use fp16 or bf16 mixed precision to reduce memory usage while maintaining most of the fp32 precision. Set fp16=True or bf16=True in TrainingArguments.
  • torch.bfloat16 or torch.float16 can reduce memory usage by 2-4x with minimal impact on model quality, allowing training with larger batch sizes.
  • bfloat16 is more numerically stable than float16 and recommended if supported by your GPU (e.g., Nvidia A100).
  • Mixed precision speeds up math-heavy operations like linear layers and convolutions.

Optimizer Choice

  • AdamW is the most common optimizer but has high memory usage.
  • Alternatives like adamw_hf, adamw_torch, adamw_apex_fused, adamw_anyprecision, or adafactor can be more memory efficient.
  • Fused optimizers like adamw_apex_fused from Apex or adamw_anyprecision fuse multiple operations for faster speed.
  • Fused Adam combines the Adam update’s elementwise operations into a single kernel, reducing memory access.

Gradient Accumulation

  • Accumulate gradients over multiple smaller batches before doing an optimizer step to emulate training with larger batch sizes. Set gradient_accumulation_steps in TrainingArguments.
  • Allows training with large effective batch sizes that don’t fit in GPU memory.
  • Increases training speed by reducing communication overhead but can slow down convergence.

Gradient Checkpointing

  • Trade off compute for memory by recomputing activations in the backward pass instead of storing them.
  • Speeds up training by allowing larger batch sizes but slows down each iteration.
  • Enable with gradient_checkpointing=True in TrainingArguments.

Efficient Data Loading

  • Use DataLoader(pin_memory=True) to speed up data transfer from CPU to GPU memory.
  • Set DataLoader(num_workers=N) to preload data with multiple worker processes.

Offload to CPU

  • Offload the optimizer state and model parameters to CPU when not in use to free up GPU memory. Set offload_optimizer=True and offload_param=True.
  • Speeds up training by allowing larger models and batch sizes.

TF32 on Ampere GPUs

  • Enable TF32 mode on Ampere or newer GPUs to automatically use the TF32 data type, which has the range of fp32 but precision of fp16. Set tf32=True in TrainingArguments.
  • Speeds up linear layers, convolutions, and matmuls with minimal accuracy impact.
  • Set torch.backends.cuda.matmul.allow_tf32 = True.

Flash Attention 2

  • Use Flash Attention 2 kernels integrated in the Transformers library to speed up attention computation and reduce memory usage.

The Trainer API in 🤗 Transformers supports most of these techniques via the TrainingArguments class. Experiment with combinations of these approaches to find the optimal tradeoff between speed, memory efficiency, and model quality for your specific model and hardware setup.

Sources https://huggingface.co/docs/transformers/en/perf_train_gpu_one

Distilling Knowledge from Large LLMs: Fine-tuning Mistral with LoRA

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As large language models (LLMs) continue to advance, there is a growing need to distill their knowledge into smaller, more efficient models suitable for real-world applications. One promising approach is knowledge distillation via fine-tuning using techniques like LoRA (Low-Rank Adaptation). In this article, we’ll dive into best practices for fine-tuning the 7B parameter Mistral model with LoRA.

The LoRA Advantage

Traditional fine-tuning updates all the weights of a pre-trained LLM, which can be computationally expensive and data-hungry, especially for large models. LoRA circumvents this by injecting trainable rank decomposition matrices into the LLM layers, enabling efficient adaptation to new tasks without modifying the original model weights.

Compared to full fine-tuning, LoRA requires significantly less compute and data, making it well-suited for fine-tuning models like Mistral. It has been shown to match or even exceed the performance of full fine-tuning on various tasks while using orders of magnitude fewer trainable parameters.

Selecting the Optimal LoRA Rank

The LoRA rank (r) determines the number of trainable parameters and directly impacts the model’s capacity to capture task-specific knowledge. A higher rank allows the model to better approximate the ideal fine-tuned weights, potentially improving performance. However, it also increases memory requirements and the risk of overfitting.

For Mistral, common ranks used are r=64 or r=128, though some have experimented with higher values like r=256 which can finetune around 8% of the model’s parameters. The optimal rank depends on the complexity of the task and dataset size – simple tasks may work well with lower r, while more complex ones may benefit from higher r.

Dataset Size and Quality

While LoRA is data-efficient compared to full fine-tuning, having sufficient high-quality training data is still crucial for achieving good performance. For a 7B model like Mistral, researchers recommend at least 50,000 examples for reasonable results, with 100,000+ examples often yielding better performance.

However, even smaller datasets of 1,000 – 10,000 carefully curated examples can be effective when using LoRA, outperforming full fine-tuning which requires much more data. Data quality and relevance to the target task are more important than sheer quantity – high-quality, curated datasets can outperform larger, noisier ones.

Using too little data (e.g. less than 1,000 examples) may lead to overfitting or poor performance. For very large datasets (>1M examples), full fine-tuning may be more effective than LoRA, depending on available compute resources.

Putting it All Together

So, what are the best practices for fine-tuning Mistral with LoRA? Based on current research, a good starting point could be:

  • LoRA rank (r) = 128
  • 10,000 – 100,000 high-quality, task-relevant examples

During training, it’s essential to monitor performance on a held-out validation set to select the best checkpoint and avoid overfitting. Additionally, increasing the LoRA alpha (lora_alpha) can help counteract a lower rank but may introduce instability.

Distillation Approaches

Beyond LoRA, researchers have explored various distillation approaches for transferring knowledge from large LLMs to smaller models:

  1. Reverse KL Divergence: Replacing the standard forward KL divergence loss with reverse KL can prevent the student model from overestimating low-probability regions of the teacher LLM’s distribution, making it more suitable for generative tasks.
  2. Multi-Task Learning with Rationales: Training the student on two tasks – label prediction and rationale generation, where rationales are intermediate reasoning steps extracted from the LLM teacher. This creates an explicit connection between inputs and outputs.
  3. Data Augmentation: Leveraging data augmentation to generate context-rich, skill-specific training data from the LLM teacher. This helps the student model approximate the teacher’s contextual abilities and ethical alignment.

The Future of LLM Distillation

As LLMs continue to grow in size and capability, techniques like LoRA and knowledge distillation will become increasingly important for making these models accessible and deployable across a wide range of applications.

By following best practices, leveraging the latest research, and adhering to legal and ethical considerations when working with LLM outputs, practitioners can effectively distill the knowledge from large models like Mistral into smaller, more efficient models tailored to their specific needs.

The possibilities for LLM distillation are vast, paving the way for a future where the power of large language models is available to everyone, regardless of computational resources.

The Story of RLHF

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Origins, Motivations, Techniques, and Modern Applications

  • AI development has evolved from early language models like BERT and T5 to advanced Large Language Models (LLMs) like GPT-4.
  • The shift from supervised learning to RLHF (Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback) addresses limitations of earlier models.
  • RLHF involves collecting human feedback, training a reward model, and using it to fine-tune LLMs for more aligned outputs.
  • RLHF enables LLMs to produce higher quality, human-aligned outputs, especially in tasks like summarization.
  • Early RLHF research laid the groundwork for advanced AI systems like InstructGPT and ChatGPT, aiming for long-term alignment of AI with human goals.

https://open.substack.com/pub/cameronrwolfe/p/the-story-of-rlhf-origins-motivations

RLHF: Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback

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In literature discussing why ChatGPT is able to capture so much of our imagination, I often come across two narratives:

  1. Scale: throwing more data and compute at it.
  2. UX: moving from a prompt interface to a more natural chat interface.

One narrative that is often glossed over is the incredible technical creativity that went into making models like ChatGPT work. One such cool idea is RLHF (Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback): incorporating reinforcement learning and human feedback into NLP.

RL has been notoriously difficult to work with, and therefore, mostly confined to gaming and simulated environments like Atari or MuJoCo. Just five years ago, both RL and NLP were progressing pretty much orthogonally – different stacks, different techniques, and different experimentation setups. It’s impressive to see it work in a new domain at a massive scale.

So, how exactly does RLHF work? Why does it work? This post will discuss the answers to those questions.

https://huyenchip.com/2023/05/02/rlhf.html

QA-LoRA: Fine-Tune a Quantized Large Language Model on Your GPU

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State-of-the-art large language models (LLMs) are pre-trained with billions of parameters. While pre-trained LLMs can perform many tasks, they can become much better once fine-tuned.

Thanks to LoRA, fine-tuning costs can be dramatically reduced. LoRA adds low-rank tensors, i.e., a small number of parameters (millions), on top of the frozen original parameters. Only the parameters in the added tensors are trained during fine-tuning.

LoRA still requires the model to be loaded in memory. To reduce the memory cost and speed-up fine-tuning, a new approach proposes quantization-aware LoRA (QA-LoRA) fine-tuning.

In this article, I explain QA-LoRA and review its performance compared with previous work (especially QLoRA). I also show how to use QA-LoRA to fine-tune your own quantization-aware LoRA for Llama 2.

https://towardsdatascience.com/qa-lora-fine-tune-a-quantized-large-language-model-on-your-gpu-c7291866706c