BitNet: Scaling 1-bit Transformers for Large Language Models
Authors: name: Hongyu Wang, name: Shuming Ma, name: Li Dong, name: Shaohan Huang, name: Huaijie Wang, name: Lingxiao Ma, name: Fan Yang, name: Ruiping Wang, name: Yi Wu, name: Furu Wei

The increasing size of large language models has posed challenges for
deployment and raised concerns about environmental impact due to high energy
consumption. In this work, we introduce BitNet, a scalable and stable 1-bit
Transformer architecture designed for large language models. Specifically, we
introduce BitLinear as a drop-in replacement of the nn.Linear layer in order to
train 1-bit weights from scratch. Experimental results on language modeling
show that BitNet achieves competitive performance while substantially reducing
memory footprint and energy consumption, compared to state-of-the-art 8-bit
quantization methods and FP16 Transformer baselines. Furthermore, BitNet
exhibits a scaling law akin to full-precision Transformers, suggesting its
potential for effective scaling to even larger language models while
maintaining efficiency and performance benefits.