Papers
arxiv:2310.06694

Sheared LLaMA: Accelerating Language Model Pre-training via Structured Pruning

Published on Oct 10, 2023
Authors:
,

Abstract

The popularity of LLaMA (Touvron et al., 2023a;b) and other recently emerged moderate-sized large language models (LLMs) highlights the potential of building smaller yet powerful LLMs. Regardless, the cost of training such models from scratch on trillions of tokens remains high. In this work, we study structured pruning as an effective means to develop smaller LLMs from pre-trained, larger models. Our approach employs two key techniques: (1) targeted structured pruning, which prunes a larger model to a specified target shape by removing layers, heads, and intermediate and hidden dimensions in an end-to-end manner, and (2) dynamic batch loading, which dynamically updates the composition of sampled data in each training batch based on varying losses across different domains. We demonstrate the efficacy of our approach by presenting the Sheared-LLaMA series, pruning the LLaMA2-7B model down to 1.3B and 2.7B parameters. Sheared-LLaMA models outperform state-of-the-art open-source models of equivalent sizes, such as Pythia, INCITE, and OpenLLaMA models, on a wide range of downstream and instruction tuning evaluations, while requiring only 3% of compute compared to training such models from scratch. This work provides compelling evidence that leveraging existing LLMs with structured pruning is a far more cost-effective approach for building smaller LLMs.

Community

Efficient LLMs: The Breakthrough of Structured Pruning

Links ๐Ÿ”—:

๐Ÿ‘‰ Subscribe: https://www.youtube.com/@Arxflix
๐Ÿ‘‰ Twitter: https://x.com/arxflix
๐Ÿ‘‰ LMNT (Partner): https://lmnt.com/

By Arxflix
9t4iCUHx_400x400-1.jpg

Sign up or log in to comment

Models citing this paper 18

Browse 18 models citing this paper

Datasets citing this paper 0

No dataset linking this paper

Cite arxiv.org/abs/2310.06694 in a dataset README.md to link it from this page.

Spaces citing this paper 5

Collections including this paper 4