Stack More Layers Differently: High-Rank Training Through Low-Rank
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Authors: name: Vladislav Lialin; name: Namrata Shivagunde; name: Sherin Muckatira; name: Anna Rumshisky
Published: 2023-07-11 18:02:09

Abstract: Despite the dominance and effectiveness of scaling, resulting in large
networks with hundreds of billions of parameters, the necessity to train
overparametrized models remains poorly understood, and alternative approaches
do not necessarily make it cheaper to train high-performance models. In this
paper, we explore low-rank training techniques as an alternative approach to
training large neural networks. We introduce a novel method called ReLoRA,
which utilizes low-rank updates to train high-rank networks. We apply ReLoRA to
pre-training transformer language models with up to 350M parameters and
demonstrate comparable performance to regular neural network training.
Furthermore, we observe that the efficiency of ReLoRA increases with model
size, making it a promising approach for training multi-billion-parameter
networks efficiently. Our findings shed light on the potential of low-rank
training techniques and their implications for scaling laws.