PockEngine: Sparse and Efficient Fine-tuning in a Pocket
Authors: name: Ligeng Zhu, name: Lanxiang Hu, name: Ji Lin, name: Wei-Chen Wang, name: Wei-Ming Chen, name: Chuang Gan, name: Song Han

On-device learning and efficient fine-tuning enable continuous and
privacy-preserving customization (e.g., locally fine-tuning large language
models on personalized data). However, existing training frameworks are
designed for cloud servers with powerful accelerators (e.g., GPUs, TPUs) and
lack the optimizations for learning on the edge, which faces challenges of
resource limitations and edge hardware diversity. We introduce PockEngine: a
tiny, sparse and efficient engine to enable fine-tuning on various edge
devices. PockEngine supports sparse backpropagation: it prunes the backward
graph and sparsely updates the model with measured memory saving and latency
reduction while maintaining the model quality. Secondly, PockEngine is
compilation first: the entire training graph (including forward, backward and
optimization steps) is derived at compile-time, which reduces the runtime
overhead and brings opportunities for graph transformations. PockEngine also
integrates a rich set of training graph optimizations, thus can further
accelerate the training cost, including operator reordering and backend
switching. PockEngine supports diverse applications, frontends and hardware
backends: it flexibly compiles and tunes models defined in
PyTorch/TensorFlow/Jax and deploys binaries to mobile CPU/GPU/DSPs. We
evaluated PockEngine on both vision models and large language models.
PockEngine achieves up to 15 times speedup over off-the-shelf TensorFlow
(Raspberry Pi), 5.6 times memory saving back-propagation (Jetson AGX Orin).
Remarkably, PockEngine enables fine-tuning LLaMav2-7B on NVIDIA Jetson AGX Orin
at 550 tokens/s, 7.9times faster than the PyTorch.