Transformer-Lite: High-efficiency Deployment of Large Language Models on
  Mobile Phone GPUs
Authors: name: Luchang Li; name: Sheng Qian; name: Jie Lu; name: Lunxi Yuan; name: Rui Wang; name: Qin Xie
Published: 2024-03-29 08:26:53

Abstract: The Large Language Model (LLM) is widely employed for tasks such as
intelligent assistants, text summarization, translation, and multi-modality on
mobile phones. However, the current methods for on-device LLM deployment
maintain slow inference speed, which causes poor user experience. To facilitate
high-efficiency LLM deployment on device GPUs, we propose four optimization
techniques: (a) a symbolic expression-based approach to support dynamic shape
model inference; (b) operator optimizations and execution priority setting to
enhance inference speed and reduce phone lagging; (c) an FP4 quantization
method termed M0E4 to reduce dequantization overhead; (d) a sub-tensor-based
technique to eliminate the need for copying KV cache after LLM inference.
Furthermore, we implement these methods in our mobile inference engine,
Transformer-Lite, which is compatible with both Qualcomm and MTK processors. We
evaluated Transformer-Lite's performance using LLMs with varied architectures
and parameters ranging from 2B to 14B. Specifically, we achieved prefill and
decoding speeds of 121 token/s and 14 token/s for ChatGLM2 6B, and 330 token/s
and 30 token/s for smaller Gemma 2B, respectively. Compared with CPU-based
FastLLM and GPU-based MLC-LLM, our engine attains over 10x speedup for the
prefill speed and 2~3x speedup for the decoding speed.