LoRA等高效微调方法仍占内存,新方法LARS降低设备端模型适配内存占用。
Parameter Efficiency Is Not Memory Efficiency: Rethinking Fine-Tuning for On-Device LLM Adaptation
- 通过约束激活子空间而非参数,解决序列长度带来的内存瓶颈
- 相比LoRA在GPU上平均降内存33.54%,CPU上达51.95%
- 可在树莓派等低资源设备运行,适合边缘端个性化大模型
参数高效微调(PEFT)已成为大语言模型(LLM)适配的标准方法。本文挑战了‘参数效率即内存效率’的普遍假设:尽管LoRA和IA3显著减少可训练参数,但其中间激活张量仍随序列长度线性增长,常导致设备端内存溢出。为此,我们提出LARS(Low-memory Activation-Rank Subspace)框架,将内存消耗与序列长度解耦。不同于以往对模型参数施加低秩约束,LARS直接约束训练中使用的激活子空间,精准应对内存主要消耗源,从根本上平滑内存增长曲线。在不同模型、推理、理解及长上下文数据集上,相比LoRA,LARS在GPU上平均降低内存33.54%,在CPU上达51.95%,同时保持竞争力的准确率与吞吐量。此外,我们在树莓派和消费级CPU上部署验证,证明LARS为资源受限硬件与边缘设备上的复杂大模型个性化提供了可扩展路径。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT) has become the standard for adapting large language models (LLMs). In this work we challenge the wide-spread assumption that parameter efficiency equates memory efficiency and on-device adaptability. We show that this is not true - while methods like LoRA and IA3 significantly reduce trainable parameters, they remain bound by intermediate tensors that scale linearly with sequence length, often triggering out-of-memory errors on-device. In this work, we introduce LARS (Low-memory Activation-Rank Subspace), a novel adaptation framework that decouples memory consumption from sequence length. While prior PEFT methods apply low-rank constraints to model parameters, LARS instead constrains the activation subspace used during training, directly targeting the dominant source of memory consumption and fundamentally flattening the memory growth rate. LARS reduces the memory footprint by an average of 33.54% on GPUs and 51.95% on CPUs in comparison to LoRA across reasoning, understanding and long-context datasets using different models while maintaining competitive accuracy and throughput. Besides GPUs, we deploy on Raspberry Pi and consumer-grade CPUs to demonstrate that LARS provides a scalable path for sophisticated LLM personalization on resource-constrained hardware and edge devices.
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