arXiv:2505.09663cs.LG2025-05NeurIPS被引 6

让大模型在模拟硬件上高效运行,保持4比特精度性能。

Analog Foundation Models

论文配图:Analog Foundation Models
图 1 · 摘自论文原文
  • 设计通用方法使大模型适应噪声与低精度的模拟计算硬件。
  • Phi-3-mini等模型在模拟硬件上表现接近4比特权重、8比特激活基线。
  • 训练后模型可直接用于低精度数字硬件,且测试时扩展性更优。

模拟存内计算(AIMC)是一种有前景的计算范式,可在传统冯诺依曼架构极限之外提升神经网络推理的速度与能效。然而,AIMC带来噪声计算和输入输出量化严格限制等根本挑战。由于这些约束与不精确性,现有大语言模型(LLM)在部署到基于AIMC的硬件时无法达到4比特性能水平。尽管此前研究已针对小型视觉模型尝试恢复精度损失,但适用于预训练于万亿级文本的通用大模型的方法尚不存在。本文提出一种通用且可扩展的方法,使大模型能在噪声大、低精度的模拟硬件上稳健运行。该方法使当前先进模型(包括Phi-3-mini-4k-instruct和Llama-3.2-1B-Instruct)在存在模拟噪声和量化限制的情况下,仍保持与4比特权重、8比特激活基线相当的性能。此外,我们发现该训练方法的副产品是:模拟基础模型可进一步量化用于低精度数字硬件推理。最后,我们的模型在测试时计算扩展方面表现更优,展现出优于4比特权重与8比特静态输入量化的模型的缩放行为。本工作弥合了高容量大模型与高效模拟硬件之间的鸿沟,为节能型基础模型提供可行路径。代码见:https://github.com/IBM/analog-foundation-models。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

Analog in-memory computing (AIMC) is a promising compute paradigm to improve speed and power efficiency of neural network inference beyond the limits of conventional von Neumann-based architectures. However, AIMC introduces fundamental challenges such as noisy computations and strict constraints on input and output quantization. Because of these constraints and imprecisions, off-the-shelf LLMs are not able to achieve 4-bit-level performance when deployed on AIMC-based hardware. While researchers previously investigated recovering this accuracy gap on small, mostly vision-based models, a generic method applicable to LLMs pre-trained on trillions of tokens does not yet exist. In this work, we introduce a general and scalable method to robustly adapt LLMs for execution on noisy, low-precision analog hardware. Our approach enables state-of-the-art models $\unicode{x2013}$ including Phi-3-mini-4k-instruct and Llama-3.2-1B-Instruct $\unicode{x2013}$ to retain performance comparable to 4-bit weight, 8-bit activation baselines, despite the presence of analog noise and quantization constraints. Additionally, we show that as a byproduct of our training methodology, analog foundation models can be quantized for inference on low-precision digital hardware. Finally, we show that our models also benefit from test-time compute scaling, showing better scaling behavior than models trained with 4-bit weight and 8-bit static input quantization. Our work bridges the gap between high-capacity LLMs and efficient analog hardware, offering a path toward energy-efficient foundation models. Code is available at https://github.com/IBM/analog-foundation-models.

大模型模拟计算低精度推理能效优化

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