Papers
arxiv:2402.04744

Progressive Gradient Flow for Robust N:M Sparsity Training in Transformers

Published on Feb 7
· Submitted by akhaliq on Feb 8
Authors:
,
,
,
,

Abstract

N:M Structured sparsity has garnered significant interest as a result of relatively modest overhead and improved efficiency. Additionally, this form of sparsity holds considerable appeal for reducing the memory footprint owing to their modest representation overhead. There have been efforts to develop training recipes for N:M structured sparsity, they primarily focus on low-sparsity regions (sim50\%). Nonetheless, performance of models trained using these approaches tends to decline when confronted with high-sparsity regions (>80\%). In this work, we study the effectiveness of existing sparse training recipes at high-sparsity regions and argue that these methods fail to sustain the model quality on par with low-sparsity regions. We demonstrate that the significant factor contributing to this disparity is the presence of elevated levels of induced noise in the gradient magnitudes. To mitigate this undesirable effect, we employ decay mechanisms to progressively restrict the flow of gradients towards pruned elements. Our approach improves the model quality by up to 2% and 5% in vision and language models at high sparsity regime, respectively. We also evaluate the trade-off between model accuracy and training compute cost in terms of FLOPs. At iso-training FLOPs, our method yields better performance compared to conventional sparse training recipes, exhibiting an accuracy improvement of up to 2%. The source code is available at https://github.com/abhibambhaniya/progressive_gradient_flow_nm_sparsity.

Community

This is an automated message from the Librarian Bot. I found the following papers similar to this paper.

The following papers were recommended by the Semantic Scholar API

Please give a thumbs up to this comment if you found it helpful!

If you want recommendations for any Paper on Hugging Face checkout this Space

You can directly ask Librarian Bot for paper recommendations by tagging it in a comment: @librarian-bot recommend

Sign up or log in to comment

Models citing this paper 0

No model linking this paper

Cite arxiv.org/abs/2402.04744 in a model README.md to link it from this page.

Datasets citing this paper 0

No dataset linking this paper

Cite arxiv.org/abs/2402.04744 in a dataset README.md to link it from this page.

Spaces citing this paper 0

No Space linking this paper

Cite arxiv.org/abs/2402.04744 in a Space README.md to link it from this page.

Collections including this paper 0

No Collection including this paper

Add this paper to a collection to link it from this page.