Bits and Bytes

Tim Dettmers (PhD candidate, University of Washington) presents "8-bit Methods for Efficient Deep Learning" in this Cohere For AI Technical Talk.

Language models are effective tools for many tasks but are difficult to train and inference due to their size.

Moving from 32-bit models to 16-bit models resulted in considerable efficiency gains that made training and inference of large models easier.

Can we train and inference in 8-bit to make further gains?

In this talk, Tim will show that 8-bit inference and training can be used without degrading performance while improving efficiency.

To make 8-bit methods work, it is essential to understand how quantization precision affects model performance and training stability as we scale the model size.

He will talk about how these factors change with scale and how we need to adjust 8-bit methods to make them work.

In particular, he will speak about 8-bit optimizers for training and Int8 inference for large language models with up to 175B parameters. These methods make training and inference more efficient and make large models more accessible to researchers.

Bits and Bytes

Summary of Transcript

Quantization is the process of mapping a large set of input values to a smaller set of discrete values, similar to histogram binning.

In linear quantization (integer quantization), the input range is divided into equal-sized bins, and each value within a bin is mapped to the bin's middle value.

Non-linear quantization allows for varying bin widths, providing higher precision in certain regions of the input range.

Tim introduces a dynamic exponent datatype that efficiently represents a wide range of values by allocating bits dynamically between the exponent and fraction parts. This datatype is particularly useful for representing extreme values (very large or very small) with high precision.

The talks about 8-bit optimizers, which reduce the memory footprint of training by quantizing the optimizer states (e.g., Adam optimizer's momentum and velocity buffers) to 8 bits.

However, outliers in the optimizer states can lead to significant quantization errors. To mitigate this, Tim proposes chunking the optimizer states into blocks and treating each block independently, isolating the impact of outliers. This method achieves performance similar to 32-bit optimizers while reducing memory usage.

Next, Tim discusses LLM.int8, a method for efficient inference of large language models using 8-bit quantization.

Outliers in activations can cause significant performance degradation in 8-bit quantized models.

LLM.int8 addresses this by identifying outlier-prone columns in the activations and processing them in 16-bit precision while keeping the rest of the activations in 8-bit precision.

This approach maintains the performance of 16-bit models while reducing memory usage, making large models like OPT-175B and LLaMA-65B accessible on consumer hardware.

Finally, Tim presents his recent work on optimal quantization for inference, comparing the performance of models with varying bit-widths and parameter counts.

Through extensive experiments, he finds that 4-bit quantization provides the best balance between model size and performance.

Models with 4-bit weights and 16-bit activations consistently outperform models with higher bit-widths and fewer parameters. Tim also explores the impact of block size and datatype on quantization performance, showing that smaller block sizes (e.g., 64) and floating-point or quantile-based datatypes yield the best results.

Tips and Tricks

1. When quantizing models, consider the distribution of your data and choose appropriate bin widths to minimize quantization errors.

2. Use block-wise quantization to isolate the impact of outliers and improve quantization stability.

3. For inference, 4-bit quantization provides the best balance between model size and performance. Use 4-bit weights and 16-bit activations for optimal results.

4. Experiment with different block sizes and datatypes to further optimize quantization performance. Smaller block sizes and floating-point or quantile-based datatypes tend to yield better results.

5. Be aware of the trade-offs between quantization precision and model size. Lower bit-widths may require more parameters to achieve the same performance as higher bit-widths.

In conclusion, quantization techniques are powerful tools for reducing the memory footprint and computational cost of deep learning models.

By carefully choosing quantization schemes, datatypes, and block sizes, you can achieve significant memory savings while maintaining high performance. As demonstrated by Tim Detmers' work, these techniques are particularly valuable for making large language models more accessible and efficient.