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Dec 25

PIM-GPT: A Hybrid Process-in-Memory Accelerator for Autoregressive Transformers

Decoder-only Transformer models such as GPT have demonstrated superior performance in text generation, by autoregressively predicting the next token. However, the performance of GPT is bounded by low compute-to-memory-ratio and high memory access. Throughput-oriented architectures such as GPUs target parallel processing rather than sequential token generation, and are not efficient for GPT acceleration, particularly on-device inference applications. Process-in-memory (PIM) architectures can significantly reduce data movement and provide high computation parallelism, and are promising candidates to accelerate GPT inference. In this work, we propose PIM-GPT that aims to achieve high throughput, high energy efficiency and end-to-end acceleration of GPT inference. PIM-GPT leverages DRAM-based PIM solutions to perform multiply-accumulate (MAC) operations on the DRAM chips, greatly reducing data movement. A compact application-specific integrated chip (ASIC) is designed and synthesized to initiate instructions to PIM chips and support data communication along with necessary arithmetic computations. At the software level, the mapping scheme is designed to maximize data locality and computation parallelism by partitioning a matrix among DRAM channels and banks to utilize all in-bank computation resources concurrently. We develop an event-driven clock-cycle accurate simulator to validate the efficacy of the proposed PIM-GPT architecture. Overall, PIM-GPT achieves 41-137times, 631-1074times speedup and 339-1085times, 890-1632times energy efficiency over GPU and CPU baseline, respectively, on 8 GPT models with up to 1.4 billion parameters.

  • 3 authors
·
Oct 13, 2023

Branch-Train-Merge: Embarrassingly Parallel Training of Expert Language Models

We present Branch-Train-Merge (BTM), a communication-efficient algorithm for embarrassingly parallel training of large language models (LLMs). We show it is possible to independently train subparts of a new class of LLMs on different subsets of the data, eliminating the massive multi-node synchronization currently required to train LLMs. BTM learns a set of independent expert LMs (ELMs), each specialized to a different textual domain, such as scientific or legal text. These ELMs can be added and removed to update data coverage, ensembled to generalize to new domains, or averaged to collapse back to a single LM for efficient inference. New ELMs are learned by branching from (mixtures of) ELMs in the current set, further training the parameters on data for the new domain, and then merging the resulting model back into the set for future use. Experiments show that BTM improves in- and out-of-domain perplexities as compared to GPT-style Transformer LMs, when controlling for training cost. Through extensive analysis, we show that these results are robust to different ELM initialization schemes, but require expert domain specialization; LM ensembles with random data splits do not perform well. We also present a study of scaling BTM into a new corpus of 64 domains (192B whitespace-separated tokens in total); the resulting LM (22.4B total parameters) performs as well as a Transformer LM trained with 2.5 times more compute. These gains grow with the number of domains, suggesting more aggressive parallelism could be used to efficiently train larger models in future work.

  • 7 authors
·
Aug 5, 2022

PanGu-$α$: Large-scale Autoregressive Pretrained Chinese Language Models with Auto-parallel Computation

Large-scale Pretrained Language Models (PLMs) have become the new paradigm for Natural Language Processing (NLP). PLMs with hundreds of billions parameters such as GPT-3 have demonstrated strong performances on natural language understanding and generation with few-shot in-context learning. In this work, we present our practice on training large-scale autoregressive language models named PanGu-alpha, with up to 200 billion parameters. PanGu-alpha is developed under the MindSpore and trained on a cluster of 2048 Ascend 910 AI processors. The training parallelism strategy is implemented based on MindSpore Auto-parallel, which composes five parallelism dimensions to scale the training task to 2048 processors efficiently, including data parallelism, op-level model parallelism, pipeline model parallelism, optimizer model parallelism and rematerialization. To enhance the generalization ability of PanGu-alpha, we collect 1.1TB high-quality Chinese data from a wide range of domains to pretrain the model. We empirically test the generation ability of PanGu-alpha in various scenarios including text summarization, question answering, dialogue generation, etc. Moreover, we investigate the effect of model scales on the few-shot performances across a broad range of Chinese NLP tasks. The experimental results demonstrate the superior capabilities of PanGu-alpha in performing various tasks under few-shot or zero-shot settings.

  • 38 authors
·
Apr 26, 2021

MIRAGE: Scaling Test-Time Inference with Parallel Graph-Retrieval-Augmented Reasoning Chains

Large reasoning models (LRMs) have shown significant progress in test-time scaling through chain-of-thought prompting. Current approaches like search-o1 integrate retrieval augmented generation (RAG) into multi-step reasoning processes but rely on a single, linear reasoning chain while incorporating unstructured textual information in a flat, context-agnostic manner. As a result, these approaches can lead to error accumulation throughout the reasoning chain, which significantly limits its effectiveness in medical question-answering (QA) tasks where both accuracy and traceability are critical requirements. To address these challenges, we propose MIRAGE (Multi-chain Inference with Retrieval-Augmented Graph Exploration), a novel test-time scalable reasoning framework that performs dynamic multi-chain inference over structured medical knowledge graphs. Specifically, MIRAGE 1) decomposes complex queries into entity-grounded sub-questions, 2) executes parallel inference chains, 3) retrieves evidence adaptively via neighbor expansion and multi-hop traversal, and 4) integrates answers using cross-chain verification to resolve contradictions. Experiments on three medical QA benchmarks (GenMedGPT-5k, CMCQA, and ExplainCPE) show that MIRAGE consistently outperforms GPT-4o, Tree-of-Thought variants, and other retrieval-augmented baselines in both automatic and human evaluations. Additionally, MIRAGE improves interpretability by generating explicit reasoning chains that trace each factual claim to concrete chains within the knowledge graph, making it well-suited for complex medical reasoning scenarios. The code will be available for further research.

  • 7 authors
·
Aug 25

Divide-Then-Aggregate: An Efficient Tool Learning Method via Parallel Tool Invocation

Although current Large Language Models (LLMs) exhibit impressive capabilities, performing complex real-world tasks still requires tool learning. Mainstream methods, such as CoT/ReAct, rely on step-by-step tool invocation to interact with external environments, but they are limited in perceptual scope and lack adequate task-planning capability. To address these limitations, other studies introduce the first Search-based Decision Tree (DFSDT), which still suffers from the high computational cost. In this paper, we introduce a novel parallel tool invocation paradigm, DTA-Llama (Divide-Then-Aggregate Llama). First, we transform traditional tree-based tool search paths into Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG) structure, generating a high-quality parallel tool invocation dataset. The DTA-Llama is then trained on the dataset to learn to iteratively divide the current task into several parallel tool invocation sub-tasks and aggregate the invocation results to decide the next actions. Furthermore, we introduce an efficient inference framework inspired by the Process/Threads mechanism when applying the DTA-Llama to practical tasks. Experimental results show that our approach substantially enhances task performance while reducing token consumption and inference time. Llama2-7B, using our method, is comparable to the official parallel function calling method of GPT-3.5. The relevant code, dataset, and model weights are available at https://corn0205.github.io/

  • 7 authors
·
Jan 21

Mutual-Supervised Learning for Sequential-to-Parallel Code Translation

The rise of GPU-based high-performance computing (HPC) has driven the widespread adoption of parallel programming models such as CUDA. Yet, the inherent complexity of parallel programming creates a demand for the automated sequential-to-parallel approaches. However, data scarcity poses a significant challenge for machine learning-based sequential-to-parallel code translation. Although recent back-translation methods show promise, they still fail to ensure functional equivalence in the translated code. In this paper, we propose a novel Mutual-Supervised Learning (MSL) framework for sequential-to-parallel code translation to address the functional equivalence issue. MSL consists of two models, a Translator and a Tester. Through an iterative loop consisting of Co-verify and Co-evolve steps, the Translator and the Tester mutually generate data for each other and improve collectively. The Tester generates unit tests to verify and filter functionally equivalent translated code, thereby evolving the Translator, while the Translator generates translated code as augmented input to evolve the Tester. Experimental results demonstrate that MuSL significantly enhances the performance of the base model: when applied to Qwen2.5-Coder, it not only improves Pass@1 by up to 28.91% and boosts Tester performance by 68.90%, but also outperforms the previous state-of-the-art method CodeRosetta by 1.56 and 6.92 in BLEU and CodeBLEU scores, while achieving performance comparable to DeepSeek-R1 and GPT-4.1. Our code is available at https://github.com/kcxain/musl.

  • 14 authors
·
Jun 11

Flover: A Temporal Fusion Framework for Efficient Autoregressive Model Parallel Inference

Autoregressive models, despite their commendable performance in a myriad of generative tasks, face challenges stemming from their inherently sequential structure. Inference on these models, by design, harnesses a temporal dependency, where the current token's probability distribution is conditioned on preceding tokens. This inherent characteristic severely impedes computational efficiency during inference as a typical inference request can require more than thousands of tokens, where generating each token requires a load of entire model weights, making the inference more memory-bound. The large overhead becomes profound in real deployment where requests arrive randomly, necessitating various generation lengths. Existing solutions, such as dynamic batching and concurrent instances, introduce significant response delays and bandwidth contention, falling short of achieving optimal latency and throughput. To address these shortcomings, we propose Flover -- a temporal fusion framework for efficiently inferring multiple requests in parallel. We deconstruct the general generation pipeline into pre-processing and token generation, and equip the framework with a dedicated work scheduler for fusing the generation process temporally across all requests. By orchestrating the token-level parallelism, Flover exhibits optimal hardware efficiency and significantly spares the system resources. By further employing a fast buffer reordering algorithm that allows memory eviction of finished tasks, it brings over 11x inference speedup on GPT and 16x on LLAMA compared to the cutting-edge solutions provided by NVIDIA FasterTransformer. Crucially, by leveraging the advanced tensor parallel technique, Flover proves efficacious across diverse computational landscapes, from single-GPU setups to distributed scenarios, thereby offering robust performance optimization that adapts to variable use cases.

  • 7 authors
·
May 22, 2023

Pard: Permutation-Invariant Autoregressive Diffusion for Graph Generation

Graph generation has been dominated by autoregressive models due to their simplicity and effectiveness, despite their sensitivity to ordering. Yet diffusion models have garnered increasing attention, as they offer comparable performance while being permutation-invariant. Current graph diffusion models generate graphs in a one-shot fashion, but they require extra features and thousands of denoising steps to achieve optimal performance. We introduce PARD, a Permutation-invariant Auto Regressive Diffusion model that integrates diffusion models with autoregressive methods. PARD harnesses the effectiveness and efficiency of the autoregressive model while maintaining permutation invariance without ordering sensitivity. Specifically, we show that contrary to sets, elements in a graph are not entirely unordered and there is a unique partial order for nodes and edges. With this partial order, PARD generates a graph in a block-by-block, autoregressive fashion, where each block's probability is conditionally modeled by a shared diffusion model with an equivariant network. To ensure efficiency while being expressive, we further propose a higher-order graph transformer, which integrates transformer with PPGN. Like GPT, we extend the higher-order graph transformer to support parallel training of all blocks. Without any extra features, PARD achieves state-of-the-art performance on molecular and non-molecular datasets, and scales to large datasets like MOSES containing 1.9M molecules.

  • 3 authors
·
Feb 5, 2024

Exploiting Inter-Layer Expert Affinity for Accelerating Mixture-of-Experts Model Inference

In large language models like the Generative Pre-trained Transformer, the Mixture of Experts paradigm has emerged as a powerful technique for enhancing model expressiveness and accuracy. However, deploying GPT MoE models for parallel inference on distributed systems presents significant challenges, primarily due to the extensive Alltoall communication required for expert routing and aggregation. This communication bottleneck exacerbates the already complex computational landscape, hindering the efficient utilization of high-performance computing resources. In this paper, we propose a lightweight optimization technique called ExFlow, to largely accelerate the inference of these MoE models. We take a new perspective on alleviating the communication overhead by exploiting the inter-layer expert affinity. Unlike previous methods, our solution can be directly applied to pre-trained MoE models without any fine-tuning or accuracy degradation. By proposing a context-coherent expert parallelism on distributed systems, our design only uses one Alltoall communication to deliver the same functionality while previous methods all require two Alltoalls. By carefully examining the conditional probability in tokens' routing across multiple layers, we proved that pre-trained GPT MoE models implicitly exhibit a strong inter-layer expert affinity. We then design an efficient integer programming model to capture such features and show that by properly placing the experts on corresponding GPUs, we can reduce up to 67% cross-GPU routing latency. Our solution beats the cutting-edge MoE implementations with experts from 8 to 64, with up to 2.2x improvement in inference throughput. We further provide a detailed study of how the model implicitly acquires this expert affinity at the very early training stage and how this affinity evolves and stabilizes during training.

  • 6 authors
·
Jan 16, 2024

MFTCoder: Boosting Code LLMs with Multitask Fine-Tuning

Code LLMs have emerged as a specialized research field, with remarkable studies dedicated to enhancing model's coding capabilities through fine-tuning on pre-trained models. Previous fine-tuning approaches were typically tailored to specific downstream tasks or scenarios, which meant separate fine-tuning for each task, requiring extensive training resources and posing challenges in terms of deployment and maintenance. Furthermore, these approaches failed to leverage the inherent interconnectedness among different code-related tasks. To overcome these limitations, we present a multi-task fine-tuning framework, MFTcoder, that enables simultaneous and parallel fine-tuning on multiple tasks. By incorporating various loss functions, we effectively address common challenges in multi-task learning, such as data imbalance, varying difficulty levels, and inconsistent convergence speeds. Extensive experiments have conclusively demonstrated that our multi-task fine-tuning approach outperforms both individual fine-tuning on single tasks and fine-tuning on a mixed ensemble of tasks. Moreover, MFTcoder offers efficient training capabilities, including efficient data tokenization modes and PEFT fine-tuning, resulting in significantly improved speed compared to traditional fine-tuning methods. MFTcoder seamlessly integrates with several mainstream open-source LLMs, such as CodeLLama and Qwen. Leveraging the CodeLLama foundation, our MFTcoder fine-tuned model, CodeFuse-CodeLLama-34B, achieves an impressive pass@1 score of 74.4\% on the HumaneEval benchmark, surpassing GPT-4 performance (67\%, zero-shot). MFTCoder is open-sourced at https://github.com/codefuse-ai/MFTCOder

codefuse-ai CodeFuse AI
·
Nov 3, 2023 1

LLM-Adapters: An Adapter Family for Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning of Large Language Models

The success of large language models (LLMs), like GPT-3 and ChatGPT, has led to the development of numerous cost-effective and accessible alternatives that are created by fine-tuning open-access LLMs with task-specific data (e.g., ChatDoctor) or instruction data (e.g., Alpaca). Among the various fine-tuning methods, adapter-based parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) is undoubtedly one of the most attractive topics, as it only requires fine-tuning a few external parameters instead of the entire LLMs while achieving comparable or even better performance. To enable further research on PEFT methods of LLMs, this paper presents LLM-Adapters, an easy-to-use framework that integrates various adapters into LLMs and can execute these adapter-based PEFT methods of LLMs for different tasks. The framework includes state-of-the-art open-access LLMs such as LLaMA, BLOOM, OPT, and GPT-J, as well as widely used adapters such as Series adapter, Parallel adapter, and LoRA. The framework is designed to be research-friendly, efficient, modular, and extendable, allowing the integration of new adapters and the evaluation of them with new and larger-scale LLMs. Furthermore, to evaluate the effectiveness of adapters in LLMs-Adapters, we conduct experiments on six math reasoning datasets. The results demonstrate that using adapter-based PEFT in smaller-scale LLMs (7B) with few extra trainable parameters yields comparable, and in some cases superior, performance to that of powerful LLMs (175B) in zero-shot inference on simple math reasoning datasets. Overall, we provide a promising framework for fine-tuning large LLMs on downstream tasks. We believe the proposed LLMs-Adapters will advance adapter-based PEFT research, facilitate the deployment of research pipelines, and enable practical applications to real-world systems.

  • 9 authors
·
Apr 4, 2023

CortexCompile: Harnessing Cortical-Inspired Architectures for Enhanced Multi-Agent NLP Code Synthesis

Current approaches to automated code generation often rely on monolithic models that lack real-time adaptability and scalability. This limitation is particularly evident in complex programming tasks that require dynamic adjustment and efficiency. The integration of neuroscience principles into Natural Language Processing (NLP) has the potential to revolutionize automated code generation. This paper presents CortexCompile, a novel modular system inspired by the specialized functions of the human brain's cortical regions. By emulating the distinct roles of the Prefrontal Cortex, Parietal Cortex, Temporal Lobe, and Motor Cortex, CortexCompile achieves significant advancements in scalability, efficiency, and adaptability compared to traditional monolithic models like GPT-4o. The system's architecture features a Task Orchestration Agent that manages dynamic task delegation and parallel processing, facilitating the generation of highly accurate and optimized code across increasingly complex programming tasks. Experimental evaluations demonstrate that CortexCompile consistently outperforms GPT-4o in development time, accuracy, and user satisfaction, particularly in tasks involving real-time strategy games and first-person shooters. These findings underscore the viability of neuroscience-inspired architectures in addressing the limitations of current NLP models, paving the way for more efficient and human-like AI systems.

  • 2 authors
·
Aug 23, 2024

MPIrigen: MPI Code Generation through Domain-Specific Language Models

The imperative need to scale computation across numerous nodes highlights the significance of efficient parallel computing, particularly in the realm of Message Passing Interface (MPI) integration. The challenging parallel programming task of generating MPI-based parallel programs has remained unexplored. This study first investigates the performance of state-of-the-art language models in generating MPI-based parallel programs. Findings reveal that widely used models such as GPT-3.5 and PolyCoder (specialized multi-lingual code models) exhibit notable performance degradation, when generating MPI-based programs compared to general-purpose programs. In contrast, domain-specific models such as MonoCoder, which are pretrained on MPI-related programming languages of C and C++, outperform larger models. Subsequently, we introduce a dedicated downstream task of MPI-based program generation by fine-tuning MonoCoder on HPCorpusMPI. We call the resulting model as MPIrigen. We propose an innovative preprocessing for completion only after observing the whole code, thus enabling better completion with a wider context. Comparative analysis against GPT-3.5 zero-shot performance, using a novel HPC-oriented evaluation method, demonstrates that MPIrigen excels in generating accurate MPI functions up to 0.8 accuracy in location and function predictions, and with more than 0.9 accuracy for argument predictions. The success of this tailored solution underscores the importance of domain-specific fine-tuning in optimizing language models for parallel computing code generation, paving the way for a new generation of automatic parallelization tools. The sources of this work are available at our GitHub MPIrigen repository: https://github.com/Scientific-Computing-Lab-NRCN/MPI-rigen

  • 13 authors
·
Feb 14, 2024 1

Scaling Large Language Model Training on Frontier with Low-Bandwidth Partitioning

Scaling up Large Language Model(LLM) training involves fitting a tremendous amount of training parameters across a limited number of workers. However, methods like ZeRO-3 that drastically reduce GPU memory pressure often incur heavy communication to ensure global synchronization and consistency. Established efforts such as ZeRO++ use secondary partitions to avoid inter-node communications, given that intra-node GPU-GPU transfer generally has more bandwidth and lower latency than inter-node connections. However, as more capable infrastructure like Frontier, equipped with AMD GPUs, emerged with impressive computing capability, there is a need for investigations on the hardware topology and to develop targeted strategies to improve training efficiency. In this work, we propose a collection of communication and optimization strategies for ZeRO++ to reduce communication costs and improve memory utilization. In this paper, we propose a 3-level hierarchical partitioning specifically for the current Top-1 supercomputing cluster, Frontier, which aims at leveraging various bandwidths across layers of communications (GCD-GCD, GPU-GPU, and inter-node) to reduce communication overhead. For a 20B GPT model, we observe a 1.71x increase in TFLOPS per GPU when compared with ZeRO++ up to 384 GCDs and a scaling efficiency of 0.94 for up to 384 GCDs. To the best of our knowledge, our work is also the first effort to efficiently optimize LLM workloads on Frontier AMD GPUs.

  • 7 authors
·
Jan 7

Pipette: Automatic Fine-grained Large Language Model Training Configurator for Real-World Clusters

Training large language models (LLMs) is known to be challenging because of the huge computational and memory capacity requirements. To address these issues, it is common to use a cluster of GPUs with 3D parallelism, which splits a model along the data batch, pipeline stage, and intra-layer tensor dimensions. However, the use of 3D parallelism produces the additional challenge of finding the optimal number of ways on each dimension and mapping the split models onto the GPUs. Several previous studies have attempted to automatically find the optimal configuration, but many of these lacked several important aspects. For instance, the heterogeneous nature of the interconnect speeds is often ignored. While the peak bandwidths for the interconnects are usually made equal, the actual attained bandwidth varies per link in real-world clusters. Combined with the critical path modeling that does not properly consider the communication, they easily fall into sub-optimal configurations. In addition, they often fail to consider the memory requirement per GPU, often recommending solutions that could not be executed. To address these challenges, we propose Pipette, which is an automatic fine-grained LLM training configurator for real-world clusters. By devising better performance models along with the memory estimator and fine-grained individual GPU assignment, Pipette achieves faster configurations that satisfy the memory constraints. We evaluated Pipette on large clusters to show that it provides a significant speedup over the prior art. The implementation of Pipette is available at https://github.com/yimjinkyu1/date2024_pipette.

  • 7 authors
·
May 28, 2024

Boosting Large-scale Parallel Training Efficiency with C4: A Communication-Driven Approach

The emergence of Large Language Models (LLMs) has necessitated the adoption of parallel training techniques, involving the deployment of thousands of GPUs to train a single model. Unfortunately, we have found that the efficiency of current parallel training is often suboptimal, largely due to the following two main issues. Firstly, hardware failures are inevitable, leading to interruptions in the training tasks. The inability to quickly identify the faulty components results in a substantial waste of GPU resources. Secondly, since GPUs must wait for parameter synchronization to complete before proceeding to the next round of computation, network congestions can greatly increase the waiting time for GPUs. To address these challenges, this paper introduces a communication-driven solution, namely the C4. The key insights of C4 are two folds. First, in parallel training, collective communication exhibits periodic and homogeneous characteristics, so any anomalies are certainly due to some form of hardware malfunction. By leveraging this feature, C4 can rapidly identify the faulty components, swiftly isolate the anomaly, and restart the task, thereby avoiding resource wastage caused by delays in anomaly detection. Second, the predictable communication model of collective communication, involving few large flows, allows C4 to efficiently execute traffic planning, substantially reducing network congestion. C4 has been extensively implemented across our production systems, cutting error-induced overhead by roughly 30% and enhancing runtime performance by about 15% for certain applications with moderate communication costs.

  • 25 authors
·
Jun 6, 2024

Holmes: Towards Distributed Training Across Clusters with Heterogeneous NIC Environment

Large language models (LLMs) such as GPT-3, OPT, and LLaMA have demonstrated remarkable accuracy in a wide range of tasks. However, training these models can incur significant expenses, often requiring tens of thousands of GPUs for months of continuous operation. Typically, this training is carried out in specialized GPU clusters equipped with homogeneous high-speed Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA) network interface cards (NICs). The acquisition and maintenance of such dedicated clusters is challenging. Current LLM training frameworks, like Megatron-LM and Megatron-DeepSpeed, focus primarily on optimizing training within homogeneous cluster settings. In this paper, we introduce Holmes, a training framework for LLMs that employs thoughtfully crafted data and model parallelism strategies over the heterogeneous NIC environment. Our primary technical contribution lies in a novel scheduling method that intelligently allocates distinct computational tasklets in LLM training to specific groups of GPU devices based on the characteristics of their connected NICs. Furthermore, our proposed framework, utilizing pipeline parallel techniques, demonstrates scalability to multiple GPU clusters, even in scenarios without high-speed interconnects between nodes in distinct clusters. We conducted comprehensive experiments that involved various scenarios in the heterogeneous NIC environment. In most cases, our framework achieves performance levels close to those achievable with homogeneous RDMA-capable networks (InfiniBand or RoCE), significantly exceeding training efficiency within the pure Ethernet environment. Additionally, we verified that our framework outperforms other mainstream LLM frameworks under heterogeneous NIC environment in terms of training efficiency and can be seamlessly integrated with them.

  • 8 authors
·
Dec 6, 2023

GPTQ: Accurate Post-Training Quantization for Generative Pre-trained Transformers

Generative Pre-trained Transformer models, known as GPT or OPT, set themselves apart through breakthrough performance across complex language modelling tasks, but also by their extremely high computational and storage costs. Specifically, due to their massive size, even inference for large, highly-accurate GPT models may require multiple performant GPUs, which limits the usability of such models. While there is emerging work on relieving this pressure via model compression, the applicability and performance of existing compression techniques is limited by the scale and complexity of GPT models. In this paper, we address this challenge, and propose GPTQ, a new one-shot weight quantization method based on approximate second-order information, that is both highly-accurate and highly-efficient. Specifically, GPTQ can quantize GPT models with 175 billion parameters in approximately four GPU hours, reducing the bitwidth down to 3 or 4 bits per weight, with negligible accuracy degradation relative to the uncompressed baseline. Our method more than doubles the compression gains relative to previously-proposed one-shot quantization methods, preserving accuracy, allowing us for the first time to execute an 175 billion-parameter model inside a single GPU for generative inference. Moreover, we also show that our method can still provide reasonable accuracy in the extreme quantization regime, in which weights are quantized to 2-bit or even ternary quantization levels. We show experimentally that these improvements can be leveraged for end-to-end inference speedups over FP16, of around 3.25x when using high-end GPUs (NVIDIA A100) and 4.5x when using more cost-effective ones (NVIDIA A6000). The implementation is available at https://github.com/IST-DASLab/gptq.

  • 4 authors
·
Oct 31, 2022

mGPT: Few-Shot Learners Go Multilingual

Recent studies report that autoregressive language models can successfully solve many NLP tasks via zero- and few-shot learning paradigms, which opens up new possibilities for using the pre-trained language models. This paper introduces two autoregressive GPT-like models with 1.3 billion and 13 billion parameters trained on 60 languages from 25 language families using Wikipedia and Colossal Clean Crawled Corpus. We reproduce the GPT-3 architecture using GPT-2 sources and the sparse attention mechanism; Deepspeed and Megatron frameworks allow us to parallelize the training and inference steps effectively. The resulting models show performance on par with the recently released XGLM models by Facebook, covering more languages and enhancing NLP possibilities for low resource languages of CIS countries and Russian small nations. We detail the motivation for the choices of the architecture design, thoroughly describe the data preparation pipeline, and train five small versions of the model to choose the most optimal multilingual tokenization strategy. We measure the model perplexity in all covered languages and evaluate it on the wide spectre of multilingual tasks, including classification, generative, sequence labeling and knowledge probing. The models were evaluated with the zero-shot and few-shot methods. Furthermore, we compared the classification tasks with the state-of-the-art multilingual model XGLM. source code and the mGPT XL model are publicly released.

  • 6 authors
·
Apr 15, 2022

Generating and Evaluating Tests for K-12 Students with Language Model Simulations: A Case Study on Sentence Reading Efficiency

Developing an educational test can be expensive and time-consuming, as each item must be written by experts and then evaluated by collecting hundreds of student responses. Moreover, many tests require multiple distinct sets of questions administered throughout the school year to closely monitor students' progress, known as parallel tests. In this study, we focus on tests of silent sentence reading efficiency, used to assess students' reading ability over time. To generate high-quality parallel tests, we propose to fine-tune large language models (LLMs) to simulate how previous students would have responded to unseen items. With these simulated responses, we can estimate each item's difficulty and ambiguity. We first use GPT-4 to generate new test items following a list of expert-developed rules and then apply a fine-tuned LLM to filter the items based on criteria from psychological measurements. We also propose an optimal-transport-inspired technique for generating parallel tests and show the generated tests closely correspond to the original test's difficulty and reliability based on crowdworker responses. Our evaluation of a generated test with 234 students from grades 2 to 8 produces test scores highly correlated (r=0.93) to those of a standard test form written by human experts and evaluated across thousands of K-12 students.

  • 6 authors
·
Oct 10, 2023

BurstGPT: A Real-world Workload Dataset to Optimize LLM Serving Systems

Serving systems for Large Language Models (LLMs) are often optimized to improve quality of service (QoS) and throughput. However, due to the lack of open-source LLM serving workloads, these systems are frequently evaluated under unrealistic workload assumptions. Consequently, performance may degrade when systems are deployed in real-world scenarios. This work presents BurstGPT, an LLM serving workload with 10.31 million traces from regional Azure OpenAI GPT services over 213 days. BurstGPT captures LLM serving characteristics from user, model and system perspectives: (1) User request concurrency: burstiness variations of requests in Azure OpenAI GPT services, revealing diversified concurrency patterns in different services and model types. (2) User conversation patterns: counts and intervals within conversations for service optimizations. (3) Model response lengths: auto-regressive serving processes of GPT models, showing statistical relations between requests and their responses. (4) System response failures: failures of conversation and API services, showing intensive resource needs and limited availability of LLM services in Azure. The details of the characteristics can serve multiple purposes in LLM serving optimizations, such as system evaluation and trace provisioning. In our demo evaluation with BurstGPT, frequent variations in BurstGPT reveal declines in efficiency, stability, or reliability in realistic LLM serving. We identify that the generalization of KV cache management, scheduling and disaggregation optimizations can be improved under realistic workload evaluations. BurstGPT is publicly available now at https://github.com/HPMLL/BurstGPT and is widely used to develop prototypes of LLM serving frameworks in the industry.

  • 14 authors
·
Jan 31, 2024

GNNPipe: Scaling Deep GNN Training with Pipelined Model Parallelism

Communication is a key bottleneck for distributed graph neural network (GNN) training. This paper proposes GNNPipe, a new approach that scales the distributed full-graph deep GNN training. Being the first to use layer-level model parallelism for GNN training, GNNPipe partitions GNN layers among GPUs, each device performs the computation for a disjoint subset of consecutive GNN layers on the whole graph. Compared to graph parallelism with each GPU handling a graph partition, GNNPipe reduces the communication volume by a factor of the number of GNN layers. GNNPipe overcomes the unique challenges for pipelined layer-level model parallelism on the whole graph by partitioning it into dependent chunks, allowing the use of historical vertex embeddings, and applying specific training techniques to ensure convergence. We also propose a hybrid approach by combining GNNPipe with graph parallelism to handle large graphs, achieve better computer resource utilization and ensure model convergence. We build a general GNN training system supporting all three parallelism setting. Extensive experiments show that our method reduces the per-epoch training time by up to 2.45x (on average 1.58x) and reduces the communication volume and overhead by up to 22.89x and 27.21x (on average 8.69x and 11.60x), respectively, while achieving a comparable level of model accuracy and convergence speed compared to graph parallelism.

  • 3 authors
·
Aug 19, 2023

LifeGPT: Topology-Agnostic Generative Pretrained Transformer Model for Cellular Automata

The Game of Life (Life), a well known algorithm within the broader class of cellular automata (CA), exhibits complex emergent dynamics, with extreme sensitivity to initial conditions. Modeling and predicting such intricate behavior without explicit knowledge of the system's underlying topology presents a significant challenge, motivating the development of algorithms that can generalize across various grid configurations and boundary conditions. We develop a decoder-only generative pretrained transformer model to solve this problem, showing that our model can simulate Life on a toroidal grid with no prior knowledge on the size of the grid, or its periodic boundary conditions (LifeGPT). LifeGPT is topology-agnostic with respect to its training data and our results show that a GPT model is capable of capturing the deterministic rules of a Turing-complete system with near-perfect accuracy, given sufficiently diverse training data. We also introduce the idea of an `autoregressive autoregressor' to recursively implement Life using LifeGPT. Our results pave the path towards true universal computation within a large language model (LLM) framework, synthesizing of mathematical analysis with natural language processing, and probing AI systems for situational awareness about the evolution of such algorithms without ever having to compute them. Similar GPTs could potentially solve inverse problems in multicellular self-assembly by extracting CA-compatible rulesets from real-world biological systems to create new predictive models, which would have significant consequences for the fields of bioinspired materials, tissue engineering, and architected materials design.

  • 2 authors
·
Sep 3, 2024

Partially Conditioned Patch Parallelism for Accelerated Diffusion Model Inference

Diffusion models have exhibited exciting capabilities in generating images and are also very promising for video creation. However, the inference speed of diffusion models is limited by the slow sampling process, restricting its use cases. The sequential denoising steps required for generating a single sample could take tens or hundreds of iterations and thus have become a significant bottleneck. This limitation is more salient for applications that are interactive in nature or require small latency. To address this challenge, we propose Partially Conditioned Patch Parallelism (PCPP) to accelerate the inference of high-resolution diffusion models. Using the fact that the difference between the images in adjacent diffusion steps is nearly zero, Patch Parallelism (PP) leverages multiple GPUs communicating asynchronously to compute patches of an image in multiple computing devices based on the entire image (all patches) in the previous diffusion step. PCPP develops PP to reduce computation in inference by conditioning only on parts of the neighboring patches in each diffusion step, which also decreases communication among computing devices. As a result, PCPP decreases the communication cost by around 70% compared to DistriFusion (the state of the art implementation of PP) and achieves 2.36sim 8.02times inference speed-up using 4sim 8 GPUs compared to 2.32sim 6.71times achieved by DistriFusion depending on the computing device configuration and resolution of generation at the cost of a possible decrease in image quality. PCPP demonstrates the potential to strike a favorable trade-off, enabling high-quality image generation with substantially reduced latency.

  • 3 authors
·
Dec 3, 2024

How Well Does GPT-4V(ision) Adapt to Distribution Shifts? A Preliminary Investigation

In machine learning, generalization against distribution shifts -- where deployment conditions diverge from the training scenarios -- is crucial, particularly in fields like climate modeling, biomedicine, and autonomous driving. The emergence of foundation models, distinguished by their extensive pretraining and task versatility, has led to an increased interest in their adaptability to distribution shifts. GPT-4V(ision) acts as the most advanced publicly accessible multimodal foundation model, with extensive applications across various domains, including anomaly detection, video understanding, image generation, and medical diagnosis. However, its robustness against data distributions remains largely underexplored. Addressing this gap, this study rigorously evaluates GPT-4V's adaptability and generalization capabilities in dynamic environments, benchmarking against prominent models like CLIP and LLaVA. We delve into GPT-4V's zero-shot generalization across 13 diverse datasets spanning natural, medical, and molecular domains. We further investigate its adaptability to controlled data perturbations and examine the efficacy of in-context learning as a tool to enhance its adaptation. Our findings delineate GPT-4V's capability boundaries in distribution shifts, shedding light on its strengths and limitations across various scenarios. Importantly, this investigation contributes to our understanding of how AI foundation models generalize to distribution shifts, offering pivotal insights into their adaptability and robustness. Code is publicly available at https://github.com/jameszhou-gl/gpt-4v-distribution-shift.

  • 11 authors
·
Dec 12, 2023

Scaling over Scaling: Exploring Test-Time Scaling Pareto in Large Reasoning Models

Large reasoning models (LRMs) have exhibited the capacity of enhancing reasoning performance via internal test-time scaling. Building upon this, a promising direction is to further scale test-time compute to unlock even greater reasoning capabilities. However, as we push these scaling boundaries, systematically understanding the practical limits and achieving optimal resource allocation becomes a critical challenge. In this paper, we investigate the scaling Pareto of test-time scaling and introduce the Test-Time Scaling Performance Model (TTSPM). We theoretically analyze two fundamental paradigms for such extended scaling, parallel scaling and sequential scaling, from a probabilistic modeling perspective. Our primary contribution is the derivation of the saturation point on the scaling budget for both strategies, identifying thresholds beyond which additional computation yields diminishing returns. Remarkably, despite their distinct mechanisms, both paradigms converge to a unified mathematical structure in their upper bounds. We empirically validate our theoretical findings on challenging reasoning benchmarks, including AIME, MATH-500, and GPQA, demonstrating the practical utility of these bounds for test-time resource allocation. We hope that this work provides insights into the cost-benefit trade-offs of test-time scaling, guiding the development of more resource-efficient inference strategies for large reasoning models.

  • 5 authors
·
May 26

T3: Transparent Tracking & Triggering for Fine-grained Overlap of Compute & Collectives

Large Language Models increasingly rely on distributed techniques for their training and inference. These techniques require communication across devices which can reduce scaling efficiency as the number of devices increases. While some distributed techniques can overlap, and thus, hide this communication with independent computations, techniques such as Tensor Parallelism (TP) inherently serialize communication with model execution. One approach to hide this serialized communication is to interleave it with the producer operation (of the communicated data) in a fine-grained manner. However, this fine-grained interleaving of communication and computation in software can be difficult. Furthermore, as with any concurrent execution, it requires compute and memory resources to be shared between computation and communication, causing resource contention that reduces overlapping efficacy. To overcome these challenges, we propose T3 which applies hardware-software co-design to transparently overlap serialized communication while minimizing resource contention with compute. T3 transparently fuses producer operations with the subsequent communication via a simple configuration of the producer's output address space and requires minor software changes. At the hardware level, T3 adds a lightweight track and trigger mechanism to orchestrate the producer's compute, and communication. It further uses compute-enhanced memories for communication's attendant compute. As a result, T3 reduces resource contention, and efficiently overlaps serialized communication with computation. For important Transformer models like T-NLG, T3 speeds up communication-heavy sublayers by 30% geomean (max 47%) and reduces data movement by 22% geomean (max 36%). Furthermore, T3's benefits persist as models scale: geomean 29% for sublayers in sim500-billion parameter models, PALM and MT-NLG.

  • 5 authors
·
Jan 29, 2024 1

Examining User-Friendly and Open-Sourced Large GPT Models: A Survey on Language, Multimodal, and Scientific GPT Models

Generative pre-trained transformer (GPT) models have revolutionized the field of natural language processing (NLP) with remarkable performance in various tasks and also extend their power to multimodal domains. Despite their success, large GPT models like GPT-4 face inherent limitations such as considerable size, high computational requirements, complex deployment processes, and closed development loops. These constraints restrict their widespread adoption and raise concerns regarding their responsible development and usage. The need for user-friendly, relatively small, and open-sourced alternative GPT models arises from the desire to overcome these limitations while retaining high performance. In this survey paper, we provide an examination of alternative open-sourced models of large GPTs, focusing on user-friendly and relatively small models that facilitate easier deployment and accessibility. Through this extensive survey, we aim to equip researchers, practitioners, and enthusiasts with a thorough understanding of user-friendly and relatively small open-sourced models of large GPTs, their current state, challenges, and future research directions, inspiring the development of more efficient, accessible, and versatile GPT models that cater to the broader scientific community and advance the field of general artificial intelligence. The source contents are continuously updating in https://github.com/GPT-Alternatives/gpt_alternatives.

  • 7 authors
·
Aug 27, 2023

DistZO2: High-Throughput and Memory-Efficient Zeroth-Order Fine-tuning LLMs with Distributed Parallel Computing

Fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) remains resource-intensive due to their sheer scale. While zeroth-order (ZO) optimization provides a memory-efficient alternative by eliminating backward passes, its application to multi-hundred-billion-parameter models is constrained by GPU memory and compute throughput. The ZO2 framework addresses the memory bottleneck by offloading model parameters to CPU memory and overlapping transformer block transfer with dual forward computation on a single GPU. However, ZO2 remains limited by its single-device execution and achieves modest throughput. In this work, we present DistZO2, a high-throughput, memory-efficient framework for distributed zeroth-order fine-tuning of LLMs. DistZO2 introduces three parallel strategies: (1) Perturbation Parallelism (PertP), which parallelizes the two perturbed forward passes across devices; (2) Distributed Data Parallelism (DDP), adapted to the scalar-gradient nature of ZO training; and (3) a unified 2D Parallelism design that combines PertP and DDP. To further mitigate communication bottlenecks introduced by parameter offloading, we propose a hardware-aware communication strategy that slices parameter blocks and redistributes them across GPUs via high-speed interconnects such as NVLink. DistZO2 scales zeroth-order fine-tuning to modern multi-GPU systems, preserving ZO2's memory efficiency while substantially improving training throughput. In our experiments on OPT-175B, DistZO2 achieves a 3x speedup over ZO2 with distributed computing. DistZO2's code has been open-sourced in https://github.com/liangyuwang/zo2.

  • 3 authors
·
Jul 3

PGN: The RNN's New Successor is Effective for Long-Range Time Series Forecasting

Due to the recurrent structure of RNN, the long information propagation path poses limitations in capturing long-term dependencies, gradient explosion/vanishing issues, and inefficient sequential execution. Based on this, we propose a novel paradigm called Parallel Gated Network (PGN) as the new successor to RNN. PGN directly captures information from previous time steps through the designed Historical Information Extraction (HIE) layer and leverages gated mechanisms to select and fuse it with the current time step information. This reduces the information propagation path to O(1), effectively addressing the limitations of RNN. To enhance PGN's performance in long-range time series forecasting tasks, we propose a novel temporal modeling framework called Temporal PGN (TPGN). TPGN incorporates two branches to comprehensively capture the semantic information of time series. One branch utilizes PGN to capture long-term periodic patterns while preserving their local characteristics. The other branch employs patches to capture short-term information and aggregate the global representation of the series. TPGN achieves a theoretical complexity of O(L), ensuring efficiency in its operations. Experimental results on five benchmark datasets demonstrate the state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance and high efficiency of TPGN, further confirming the effectiveness of PGN as the new successor to RNN in long-range time series forecasting. The code is available in this repository: https://github.com/Water2sea/TPGN.

  • 6 authors
·
Sep 26, 2024

Optimizing Distributed Training on Frontier for Large Language Models

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable success as foundational models, benefiting various downstream applications through fine-tuning. Recent studies on loss scaling have demonstrated the superior performance of larger LLMs compared to their smaller counterparts. Nevertheless, training LLMs with billions of parameters poses significant challenges and requires considerable computational resources. For example, training a one trillion parameter GPT-style model on 20 trillion tokens requires a staggering 120 million exaflops of computation. This research explores efficient distributed training strategies to extract this computation from Frontier, the world's first exascale supercomputer dedicated to open science. We enable and investigate various model and data parallel training techniques, such as tensor parallelism, pipeline parallelism, and sharded data parallelism, to facilitate training a trillion-parameter model on Frontier. We empirically assess these techniques and their associated parameters to determine their impact on memory footprint, communication latency, and GPU's computational efficiency. We analyze the complex interplay among these techniques and find a strategy to combine them to achieve high throughput through hyperparameter tuning. We have identified efficient strategies for training large LLMs of varying sizes through empirical analysis and hyperparameter tuning. For 22 Billion, 175 Billion, and 1 Trillion parameters, we achieved GPU throughputs of 38.38%, 36.14%, and 31.96%, respectively. For the training of the 175 Billion parameter model and the 1 Trillion parameter model, we achieved 100% weak scaling efficiency on 1024 and 3072 MI250X GPUs, respectively. We also achieved strong scaling efficiencies of 89% and 87% for these two models.

  • 8 authors
·
Dec 19, 2023

SARATHI: Efficient LLM Inference by Piggybacking Decodes with Chunked Prefills

Large Language Model (LLM) inference consists of two distinct phases - prefill phase which processes the input prompt and decode phase which generates output tokens autoregressively. While the prefill phase effectively saturates GPU compute at small batch sizes, the decode phase results in low compute utilization as it generates one token at a time per request. The varying prefill and decode times also lead to imbalance across micro-batches when using pipeline parallelism, resulting in further inefficiency due to bubbles. We present SARATHI to address these challenges. SARATHI employs chunked-prefills, which splits a prefill request into equal sized chunks, and decode-maximal batching, which constructs a batch using a single prefill chunk and populates the remaining slots with decodes. During inference, the prefill chunk saturates GPU compute, while the decode requests 'piggyback' and cost up to an order of magnitude less compared to a decode-only batch. Chunked-prefills allows constructing multiple decode-maximal batches from a single prefill request, maximizing coverage of decodes that can piggyback. Furthermore, the uniform compute design of these batches ameliorates the imbalance between micro-batches, significantly reducing pipeline bubbles. Our techniques yield significant improvements in inference performance across models and hardware. For the LLaMA-13B model on A6000 GPU, SARATHI improves decode throughput by up to 10x, and accelerates end-to-end throughput by up to 1.33x. For LLaMa-33B on A100 GPU, we achieve 1.25x higher end-to-end-throughput and up to 4.25x higher decode throughput. When used with pipeline parallelism on GPT-3, SARATHI reduces bubbles by 6.29x, resulting in an end-to-end throughput improvement of 1.91x.

  • 6 authors
·
Aug 30, 2023

To Backtrack or Not to Backtrack: When Sequential Search Limits Model Reasoning

Recent advancements in large language models have significantly improved their reasoning abilities, particularly through techniques involving search and backtracking. Backtracking naturally scales test-time compute by enabling sequential, linearized exploration via long chain-of-thought (CoT) generation. However, this is not the only strategy for scaling test-time compute: parallel sampling with best-of-n selection provides an alternative that generates diverse solutions simultaneously. Despite the growing adoption of sequential search, its advantages over parallel sampling--especially under a fixed compute budget remain poorly understood. In this paper, we systematically compare these two approaches on two challenging reasoning tasks: CountDown and Sudoku. Surprisingly, we find that sequential search underperforms parallel sampling on CountDown but outperforms it on Sudoku, suggesting that backtracking is not universally beneficial. We identify two factors that can cause backtracking to degrade performance: (1) training on fixed search traces can lock models into suboptimal strategies, and (2) explicit CoT supervision can discourage "implicit" (non-verbalized) reasoning. Extending our analysis to reinforcement learning (RL), we show that models with backtracking capabilities benefit significantly from RL fine-tuning, while models without backtracking see limited, mixed gains. Together, these findings challenge the assumption that backtracking universally enhances LLM reasoning, instead revealing a complex interaction between task structure, training data, model scale, and learning paradigm.

  • 4 authors
·
Apr 9

GPipe: Efficient Training of Giant Neural Networks using Pipeline Parallelism

Scaling up deep neural network capacity has been known as an effective approach to improving model quality for several different machine learning tasks. In many cases, increasing model capacity beyond the memory limit of a single accelerator has required developing special algorithms or infrastructure. These solutions are often architecture-specific and do not transfer to other tasks. To address the need for efficient and task-independent model parallelism, we introduce GPipe, a pipeline parallelism library that allows scaling any network that can be expressed as a sequence of layers. By pipelining different sub-sequences of layers on separate accelerators, GPipe provides the flexibility of scaling a variety of different networks to gigantic sizes efficiently. Moreover, GPipe utilizes a novel batch-splitting pipelining algorithm, resulting in almost linear speedup when a model is partitioned across multiple accelerators. We demonstrate the advantages of GPipe by training large-scale neural networks on two different tasks with distinct network architectures: (i) Image Classification: We train a 557-million-parameter AmoebaNet model and attain a top-1 accuracy of 84.4% on ImageNet-2012, (ii) Multilingual Neural Machine Translation: We train a single 6-billion-parameter, 128-layer Transformer model on a corpus spanning over 100 languages and achieve better quality than all bilingual models.

  • 11 authors
·
Nov 16, 2018

ParaThinker: Native Parallel Thinking as a New Paradigm to Scale LLM Test-time Compute

Recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) have been driven by test-time compute scaling - a strategy that improves reasoning by generating longer, sequential thought processes. While effective, this approach encounters a significant bottleneck as computation increases, where further computation offers only marginal performance gains. We argue this ceiling is not an inherent limit of the model's capability but a flaw in the scaling strategy itself, a phenomenon we term "Tunnel Vision", where a model's imperfect initial steps lock it into a suboptimal reasoning path. To overcome this, we introduce a new scaling paradigm: native thought parallelism. We present ParaThinker, an end-to-end framework that trains an LLM to generate multiple, diverse reasoning paths in parallel and synthesize them into a superior final answer. By exploring different lines of thoughts simultaneously, ParaThinker effectively sidesteps the Tunnel Vision issue and unlocks the model's latent reasoning potential. Our approach demonstrates that scaling compute in parallel (width) is a more effective and efficient way to superior reasoning than simply scaling sequentially (depth). On challenging reasoning benchmarks, ParaThinker achieves substantial accuracy improvements over sequential LLMs (12.3% for 1.5B and 7.5% for 7B models on average with 8 parallel paths), while adding only negligible latency overhead (7.1%). This enables smaller models to surpass much larger counterparts and establishes parallel thinking as a critical, efficient dimension for scaling future LLMs.

  • 7 authors
·
Aug 29

Parallel-R1: Towards Parallel Thinking via Reinforcement Learning

Parallel thinking has emerged as a novel approach for enhancing the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs) by exploring multiple reasoning paths concurrently. However, activating such capabilities through training remains challenging, as existing methods predominantly rely on supervised fine-tuning (SFT) over synthetic data, which encourages teacher-forced imitation rather than exploration and generalization. Different from them, we propose Parallel-R1, the first reinforcement learning (RL) framework that enables parallel thinking behaviors for complex real-world reasoning tasks. Our framework employs a progressive curriculum that explicitly addresses the cold-start problem in training parallel thinking with RL. We first use SFT on prompt-generated trajectories from easier tasks to instill the parallel thinking ability, then transition to RL to explore and generalize this skill on harder problems. Experiments on various math benchmarks, including MATH, AMC23, and AIME, show that Parallel-R1 successfully instills parallel thinking, leading to 8.4% accuracy improvements over the sequential thinking model trained directly on challenging tasks with RL. Further analysis reveals a clear shift in the model's thinking behavior: at an early stage, it uses parallel thinking as an exploration strategy, while in a later stage, it uses the same capability for multi-perspective verification. Most significantly, we validate parallel thinking as a mid-training exploration scaffold, where this temporary exploratory phase unlocks a higher performance ceiling after RL, yielding a 42.9% improvement over the baseline on AIME25. Our model, data, and code will be open-source at https://github.com/zhengkid/Parallel-R1.

tencent Tencent
·
Sep 9 3

Parallel Scaling Law for Language Models

It is commonly believed that scaling language models should commit a significant space or time cost, by increasing the parameters (parameter scaling) or output tokens (inference-time scaling). We introduce the third and more inference-efficient scaling paradigm: increasing the model's parallel computation during both training and inference time. We apply P diverse and learnable transformations to the input, execute forward passes of the model in parallel, and dynamically aggregate the P outputs. This method, namely parallel scaling (ParScale), scales parallel computation by reusing existing parameters and can be applied to any model structure, optimization procedure, data, or task. We theoretically propose a new scaling law and validate it through large-scale pre-training, which shows that a model with P parallel streams is similar to scaling the parameters by O(log P) while showing superior inference efficiency. For example, ParScale can use up to 22times less memory increase and 6times less latency increase compared to parameter scaling that achieves the same performance improvement. It can also recycle an off-the-shelf pre-trained model into a parallelly scaled one by post-training on a small amount of tokens, further reducing the training budget. The new scaling law we discovered potentially facilitates the deployment of more powerful models in low-resource scenarios, and provides an alternative perspective for the role of computation in machine learning.

  • 8 authors
·
May 15 3

ResearchGPT: Benchmarking and Training LLMs for End-to-End Computer Science Research Workflows

As large language models (LLMs) advance, the ultimate vision for their role in science is emerging: we could build an AI collaborator to effectively assist human beings throughout the entire scientific research process. We refer to this envisioned system as ResearchGPT. Given that scientific research progresses through multiple interdependent phases, achieving this vision requires rigorous benchmarks that evaluate the end-to-end workflow rather than isolated sub-tasks. To this end, we contribute CS-54k, a high-quality corpus of scientific Q&A pairs in computer science, built from 14k CC-licensed papers. It is constructed through a scalable, paper-grounded pipeline that combines retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) with multi-stage quality control to ensure factual grounding. From this unified corpus, we derive two complementary subsets: CS-4k, a carefully curated benchmark for evaluating AI's ability to assist scientific research, and CS-50k, a large-scale training dataset. Extensive experiments demonstrate that CS-4k stratifies state-of-the-art LLMs into distinct capability tiers. Open models trained on CS-50k with supervised training and reinforcement learning demonstrate substantial improvements. Even 7B-scale models, when properly trained, outperform many larger proprietary systems, such as GPT-4.1, GPT-4o, and Gemini 2.5 Pro. This indicates that making AI models better research assistants relies more on domain-aligned training with high-quality data than on pretraining scale or general benchmark performance. We release CS-4k and CS-50k in the hope of fostering AI systems as reliable collaborators in CS research.

  • 15 authors
·
Oct 23

Sequential Gradient Coding For Straggler Mitigation

In distributed computing, slower nodes (stragglers) usually become a bottleneck. Gradient Coding (GC), introduced by Tandon et al., is an efficient technique that uses principles of error-correcting codes to distribute gradient computation in the presence of stragglers. In this paper, we consider the distributed computation of a sequence of gradients {g(1),g(2),ldots,g(J)}, where processing of each gradient g(t) starts in round-t and finishes by round-(t+T). Here Tgeq 0 denotes a delay parameter. For the GC scheme, coding is only across computing nodes and this results in a solution where T=0. On the other hand, having T>0 allows for designing schemes which exploit the temporal dimension as well. In this work, we propose two schemes that demonstrate improved performance compared to GC. Our first scheme combines GC with selective repetition of previously unfinished tasks and achieves improved straggler mitigation. In our second scheme, which constitutes our main contribution, we apply GC to a subset of the tasks and repetition for the remainder of the tasks. We then multiplex these two classes of tasks across workers and rounds in an adaptive manner, based on past straggler patterns. Using theoretical analysis, we demonstrate that our second scheme achieves significant reduction in the computational load. In our experiments, we study a practical setting of concurrently training multiple neural networks over an AWS Lambda cluster involving 256 worker nodes, where our framework naturally applies. We demonstrate that the latter scheme can yield a 16\% improvement in runtime over the baseline GC scheme, in the presence of naturally occurring, non-simulated stragglers.

  • 3 authors
·
Nov 24, 2022

GPT-ImgEval: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Diagnosing GPT4o in Image Generation

The recent breakthroughs in OpenAI's GPT4o model have demonstrated surprisingly good capabilities in image generation and editing, resulting in significant excitement in the community. This technical report presents the first-look evaluation benchmark (named GPT-ImgEval), quantitatively and qualitatively diagnosing GPT-4o's performance across three critical dimensions: (1) generation quality, (2) editing proficiency, and (3) world knowledge-informed semantic synthesis. Across all three tasks, GPT-4o demonstrates strong performance, significantly surpassing existing methods in both image generation control and output quality, while also showcasing exceptional knowledge reasoning capabilities. Furthermore, based on the GPT-4o's generated data, we propose a classification-model-based approach to investigate the underlying architecture of GPT-4o, where our empirical results suggest the model consists of an auto-regressive (AR) combined with a diffusion-based head for image decoding, rather than the VAR-like architectures. We also provide a complete speculation on GPT-4o's overall architecture. In addition, we conduct a series of analyses to identify and visualize GPT-4o's specific limitations and the synthetic artifacts commonly observed in its image generation. We also present a comparative study of multi-round image editing between GPT-4o and Gemini 2.0 Flash, and discuss the safety implications of GPT-4o's outputs, particularly their detectability by existing image forensic models. We hope that our work can offer valuable insight and provide a reliable benchmark to guide future research, foster reproducibility, and accelerate innovation in the field of image generation and beyond. The codes and datasets used for evaluating GPT-4o can be found at https://github.com/PicoTrex/GPT-ImgEval.

Challenging the Need for Packet Spraying in Large-Scale Distributed Training

Large-scale distributed training in production datacenters constitutes a challenging workload bottlenecked by network communication. In response, both major industry players (e.g., Ultra Ethernet Consortium) and parts of academia have surprisingly, and almost unanimously, agreed that packet spraying is necessary to improve the performance of large-scale distributed training workloads. In this paper, we challenge this prevailing belief and pose the question: How close can a singlepath transport approach an optimal multipath transport? We demonstrate that singlepath transport (from a NIC's perspective) is sufficient and can perform nearly as well as an ideal multipath transport with packet spraying, particularly in the context of distributed training in leaf-spine topologies. Our assertion is based on four key observations about workloads driven by collective communication patterns: (i) flows within a collective start almost simultaneously, (ii) flow sizes are nearly equal, (iii) the completion time of a collective is more crucial than individual flow completion times, and (iv) flows can be split upon arrival. We analytically prove that singlepath transport, using minimal flow splitting (at the application layer), is equivalent to an ideal multipath transport with packet spraying in terms of maximum congestion. Our preliminary evaluations support our claims. This paper suggests an alternative agenda for developing next-generation transport protocols tailored for large-scale distributed training.

  • 3 authors
·
Jun 29, 2024

Prime Collective Communications Library -- Technical Report

This report presents the Prime Collective Communications Library (PCCL), a novel fault-tolerant collective communication library designed for distributed ML workloads over the public internet. PCCL introduces a new programming model that enables dynamic peer joining and failure recovery. The library implements efficient collective operations like all-reduce while providing robust fault tolerance mechanisms that allow the system to continue operating even when peers fail or join during ongoing operations. We demonstrate that PCCL's design enables practical solutions to dynamic membership challenges in workloads with repeated operations and deterministic state advancement. Our implementation passes extensive stress tests across all major operating systems, showing reliable operation even under rapid peer churn and concurrent collective operations. By dispatching to multiple connections, we can efficiently utilize cross-continental long-fat-pipe TCP WAN links, in our experiments achieving up to 45 Gbit/s of bandwidth utilization across Europe and 25 Gbit/s across North America and Europe. PCCL's architecture enables easy implementation of distributed low-communication optimization strategies like DiLoCo, which significantly reduce communication frequency. Combined with quantization, this leads to a significant reduction in the bandwidth required for distributed training workloads. PCCL also allows for concurrent collective operations, which enables optimization strategies like async DiLoCo, which can completely hide communication overhead by implementing one-step delayed parameter updates. PCCL can facilitate exact bit-parity of the shared state across peers in all cases induced by graceful or abrupt peer churn. While PCCL exposes a C99 API, Python bindings are available which are compatible with PyTorch alongside FSDP. PCCL is available under the open source MIT license.

  • 5 authors
·
May 20

Investigating the Efficacy of Large Language Models for Code Clone Detection

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable success in various natural language processing and software engineering tasks, such as code generation. The LLMs are mainly utilized in the prompt-based zero/few-shot paradigm to guide the model in accomplishing the task. GPT-based models are one of the popular ones studied for tasks such as code comment generation or test generation. These tasks are `generative' tasks. However, there is limited research on the usage of LLMs for `non-generative' tasks such as classification using the prompt-based paradigm. In this preliminary exploratory study, we investigated the applicability of LLMs for Code Clone Detection (CCD), a non-generative task. By building a mono-lingual and cross-lingual CCD dataset derived from CodeNet, we first investigated two different prompts using ChatGPT to detect Type-4 code clones in Java-Java and Java-Ruby pairs in a zero-shot setting. We then conducted an analysis to understand the strengths and weaknesses of ChatGPT in CCD. ChatGPT surpasses the baselines in cross-language CCD attaining an F1-score of 0.877 and achieves comparable performance to fully fine-tuned models for mono-lingual CCD, with an F1-score of 0.878. Also, the prompt and the difficulty level of the problems has an impact on the performance of ChatGPT. Finally we provide insights and future directions based on our initial analysis

  • 5 authors
·
Jan 24, 2024

Parallel Neural Computing for Scene Understanding from LiDAR Perception in Autonomous Racing

Autonomous driving in high-speed racing, as opposed to urban environments, presents significant challenges in scene understanding due to rapid changes in the track environment. Traditional sequential network approaches may struggle to meet the real-time knowledge and decision-making demands of an autonomous agent covering large displacements in a short time. This paper proposes a novel baseline architecture for developing sophisticated models capable of true hardware-enabled parallelism, achieving neural processing speeds that mirror the agent's high velocity. The proposed model (Parallel Perception Network (PPN)) consists of two independent neural networks, segmentation and reconstruction networks, running parallelly on separate accelerated hardware. The model takes raw 3D point cloud data from the LiDAR sensor as input and converts it into a 2D Bird's Eye View Map on both devices. Each network independently extracts its input features along space and time dimensions and produces outputs parallelly. The proposed method's model is trained on a system with two NVIDIA T4 GPUs, using a combination of loss functions, including edge preservation, and demonstrates a 2x speedup in model inference time compared to a sequential configuration. Implementation is available at: https://github.com/suwesh/Parallel-Perception-Network. Learned parameters of the trained networks are provided at: https://huggingface.co/suwesh/ParallelPerceptionNetwork.

  • 1 authors
·
Dec 23, 2024

Multiverse: Your Language Models Secretly Decide How to Parallelize and Merge Generation

Autoregressive Large Language Models (AR-LLMs) frequently exhibit implicit parallelism in sequential generation. Inspired by this, we introduce Multiverse, a new generative model that enables natively parallel generation. Multiverse internalizes a MapReduce paradigm, generating automatically through three stages: (i) a Map stage for adaptive task decomposition, (ii) a Process stage for parallel subtask execution, and (iii) a Reduce stage for lossless result synthesis. Next, we build a real-world Multiverse reasoning model with co-design of data, algorithm, and system, enabling rapid and seamless transfer from frontier AR-LLMs. Starting from sequential reasoning chains, we create Multiverse 1K by converting them into structured training data using an automated LLM-assisted pipeline, avoiding costly human annotations. Algorithmically, we design Multiverse Attention to separate parallel reasoning steps while keeping compatibility with causal attention for efficient training. Systematically, we implement Multiverse Engine to enable parallel inference. It features a dedicated scheduler that dynamically switches between sequential and parallel generation, triggered directly by the model. After a 3-hour fine-tuning with 1K examples, our Multiverse-32B stands as the only open-sourced non-AR model achieving performance on par with leading AR-LLMs of the same scale, evidenced by AIME24 & 25 scores of 54% and 46%, respectively. Moreover, our budget control experiments show that Multiverse-32B exhibits superior scaling, outperforming AR-LLMs by 1.87% on average using the same context length. Such scaling further leads to practical efficiency gain, achieving up to 2x speedup across varying batch sizes. We have open-sourced the entire Multiverse ecosystem, including data, model weights, engine, supporting tools, as well as complete data curation prompts and detailed training and evaluation recipes.

  • 5 authors
·
Jun 11 2

Understanding GEMM Performance and Energy on NVIDIA Ada Lovelace: A Machine Learning-Based Analytical Approach

Analytical framework for predicting General Matrix Multiplication (GEMM) performance on modern GPUs, focusing on runtime, power consumption, and energy efficiency. Our study employs two approaches: a custom-implemented tiled matrix multiplication kernel for fundamental analysis, and NVIDIA's CUTLASS library for comprehensive performance data collection across advanced configurations. Using the NVIDIA RTX 4070 as our experimental platform, we developed a Random Forest-based prediction model with multi-output regression capability. Through analysis of both naive tiled matrix multiplication with varying tile sizes (1 to 32) and 16,128 CUTLASS GEMM operations across diverse configurations, we identified critical performance patterns related to matrix dimensions, thread block configurations, and memory access patterns. Our framework achieved exceptional accuracy with an R^2 score of 0.98 for runtime prediction (mean error 15.57%) and 0.78 for power prediction (median error 5.42%). The system successfully predicts performance across matrix sizes, demonstrating robust scaling behavior. Our results show that optimal tile size selection can improve performance by up to 3.2x while reducing power consumption by 22% compared to baseline configurations. Analysis of shared memory utilization and SM occupancy reveals that tile sizes of 16x16 achieve the best balance between parallelism and resource usage. The implementation of our framework, including prediction models and analysis tools, is available as an open-source project at GPPerf [https://github.com/pavlyhalim/GPPerf].

  • 3 authors
·
Nov 25, 2024

CO2: Efficient Distributed Training with Full Communication-Computation Overlap

The fundamental success of large language models hinges upon the efficacious implementation of large-scale distributed training techniques. Nevertheless, building a vast, high-performance cluster featuring high-speed communication interconnectivity is prohibitively costly, and accessible only to prominent entities. In this work, we aim to lower this barrier and democratize large-scale training with limited bandwidth clusters. We propose a new approach called CO2 that introduces local-updating and asynchronous communication to the distributed data-parallel training, thereby facilitating the full overlap of COmunication with COmputation. CO2 is able to attain a high scalability even on extensive multi-node clusters constrained by very limited communication bandwidth. We further propose the staleness gap penalty and outer momentum clipping techniques together with CO2 to bolster its convergence and training stability. Besides, CO2 exhibits seamless integration with well-established ZeRO-series optimizers which mitigate memory consumption of model states with large model training. We also provide a mathematical proof of convergence, accompanied by the establishment of a stringent upper bound. Furthermore, we validate our findings through an extensive set of practical experiments encompassing a wide range of tasks in the fields of computer vision and natural language processing. These experiments serve to demonstrate the capabilities of CO2 in terms of convergence, generalization, and scalability when deployed across configurations comprising up to 128 A100 GPUs. The outcomes emphasize the outstanding capacity of CO2 to hugely improve scalability, no matter on clusters with 800Gbps RDMA or 80Gbps TCP/IP inter-node connections.

  • 8 authors
·
Jan 29, 2024

ThreadWeaver: Adaptive Threading for Efficient Parallel Reasoning in Language Models

Scaling inference-time computation has enabled Large Language Models (LLMs) to achieve strong reasoning performance, but inherently sequential decoding leads to substantial latency, especially on complex tasks. Recent work on adaptive parallel reasoning aims to improve inference efficiency by decomposing the problem-solving process into concurrent reasoning threads when beneficial. However, existing methods on realistic tasks are either limited to supervised behavior cloning or exhibit significant accuracy drops compared to widely-used sequential long chain-of-thought (CoT) baselines. Moreover, many require customized inference engines, complicating deployment. We introduce ThreadWeaver, a framework for adaptive parallel reasoning that achieves accuracy on par with popular sequential reasoning models of comparable size while significantly reducing inference latency. ThreadWeaver's performance stems from three key innovations: 1) a two-stage parallel trajectory generator that produces large-scale, high-quality CoT data with parallel annotations for supervised fine-tuning; 2) a trie-based training-inference co-design that enables parallel reasoning on any off-the-shelf autoregressive inference engine without modifying position embeddings or KV caches; and 3) a parallelization-aware reinforcement learning framework that teaches the model to balance accuracy with effective parallelization. Across six challenging mathematical reasoning benchmarks, ThreadWeaver trained atop Qwen3-8B achieves accuracy comparable to cutting-edge sequential reasoning models (71.9% on average and 79.9% on AIME24) while delivering up to 1.53x average speedup in token latency, establishing a new Pareto frontier between accuracy and efficiency.

  • 10 authors
·
Nov 24 3

TokenRing: An Efficient Parallelism Framework for Infinite-Context LLMs via Bidirectional Communication

Efficient parallelization of Large Language Models (LLMs) with long sequences is essential but challenging due to their significant computational and memory demands, particularly stemming from communication bottlenecks in attention mechanisms. While sequence parallelism (SP) has been introduced as a potential solution, existing methods often suffer from limited scalability or inefficiency, rendering their effectiveness. Ring-Attention demonstrates the potential for scaling sequence processing but faces significant limitations due to its reliance on peer-to-peer (P2P) communication and inefficient utilization of network resources. As the degree of SP increases, the quadratic decrease in computation time per step contrasts sharply with the linear reduction in communication volume, exacerbating communication bottlenecks. To address these challenges, we propose TokenRing, a fine-grained parallel framework that leverages bidirectional P2P communication to effectively overlap computation and data transmission. By partitioning the attention block and concurrently transmitting Query and block outputs (i.e., block_out and block_lse) within a fully connected mesh topology, TokenRing achieves significant reductions in communication overhead and better load balancing. These innovations improve the scalability and efficiency of distributed Transformer models, particularly for long-context sequences. Experimental results demonstrate that TokenRing enhances throughput and reduces communication latency. Moreover, its design adapts seamlessly to various multi-GPU interconnect solutions, such as Huawei Ascend, ensuring broad compatibility and cost-effectiveness for distributed LLM inference and training. The code is available at: https://github.com/ACA-Lab-SJTU/token-ring.

  • 4 authors
·
Dec 29, 2024