通过结构化费雪信息矩阵逼近,设计低内存高效优化器。
Towards Efficient Optimizer Design for LLM via Structured Fisher Approximation with a Low-Rank Extension
- 基于费雪信息矩阵结构假设,统一解释现有高效优化器。
- 提出两种新优化器,收敛速度比Adam快2倍以上,内存开销极低。
- 适合大模型训练,尤其对内存敏感场景有显著优势。
为大型语言模型(LLMs)设计低内存、快速收敛的高效优化器是一个重要且具有挑战性的问题。本文从结构化费雪信息矩阵(FIM)近似视角出发,系统性地推进了此类优化器的设计。我们发现,许多先进的高效优化器可视为在弗罗贝尼乌斯范数下对FIM进行近似求解的结果,且依赖于特定的结构假设。基于此,我们提出两项实用设计建议:一是合理选择结构假设以平衡通用性与效率;二是通过新颖的低秩扩展框架提升通用结构优化器的内存效率。我们据此推导出两种新型内存高效的优化器:行-列缩放SGD(RACS)和自适应低维子空间估计(Alice)。在高达10亿参数的LLaMA预训练任务中,实验验证了其有效性:相比现有内存高效的基线方法及Adam,收敛更快且表现更优,内存开销极小。值得注意的是,Alice在收敛速度上优于Adam两倍以上,而RACS在保持类似SGD内存消耗的同时,在10亿参数模型上表现出强劲性能。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Designing efficient optimizers for large language models (LLMs) with low-memory requirements and fast convergence is an important and challenging problem. This paper makes a step towards the systematic design of such optimizers through the lens of structured Fisher information matrix (FIM) approximation. We show that many state-of-the-art efficient optimizers can be viewed as solutions to FIM approximation (under the Frobenius norm) with specific structural assumptions. Building on these insights, we propose two design recommendations of practical efficient optimizers for LLMs, involving the careful selection of structural assumptions to balance generality and efficiency, and enhancing memory efficiency of optimizers with general structures through a novel low-rank extension framework. We demonstrate how to use each design approach by deriving new memory-efficient optimizers: Row and Column Scaled SGD (RACS) and Adaptive low-dimensional subspace estimation (Alice). Experiments on LLaMA pre-training (up to 1B parameters) validate the effectiveness, showing faster and better convergence than existing memory-efficient baselines and Adam with little memory overhead. Notably, Alice achieves better than 2x faster convergence over Adam, while RACS delivers strong performance on the 1B model with SGD-like memory.
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