提出GASLoC,让大模型训练通信更高效且适应异构环境。
Unifying Local Communications and Local Updates for LLM Pretraining

- 用去中心化框架实现按需通信,支持本地优化器更新。
- 单次通信下性能超越现有算法,异构带宽下优势明显。
- 适合分布式训练场景,尤其适用于网络不均的集群。
随着大语言模型(LLM)训练依赖跨集群、数据中心和低带宽链路的分布式计算,通信效率日益重要。现有方法虽降低通信频率,但仍依赖同步All-Reduce操作,要求模型状态一致,受限于全局集体通信,导致在带宽或节点速度异构时成为瓶颈。本文提出GASLoC,一种新型去中心化预训练算法,将通信加速机制推广至流行的“外优化器”范式,构建兼容自适应优化器、支持本地优化步、可利用稀疏随机邻居通信的实用训练框架。在多个标准LLM训练任务上,实验表明,在单步通信设置下,GASLoC优于当前最优去中心化算法;且与以往去中心化方法不同,它在多本地步配置下性能可媲美DiLoCo。在异构带宽条件下,其表现显著优于DiLoCo。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Communication-efficient pre-training of LLMs is increasingly important as training draws on compute distributed across clusters, data centers, and lower-bandwidth links. Many practical methods reduce communication frequency but still rely on synchronous All-Reduce operations that maintain identical model states and tie progress to global collectives. This can become a bottleneck when bandwidth or worker speed is heterogeneous. We introduce GASLoC, a novel decentralized pre-training algorithm that generalizes the notion of communication acceleration to the recently popular "outer optimizer" to allow a practical gossip-based training framework that is compatible with adaptive optimizers, allows for local optimizer steps, and can utilize sparse randomized peer communication. Empirically, on a number of standard LLM training tasks, we demonstrate that GASLoC outperforms state-of-the-art decentralized algorithms in single step per communication setting for a number of topologies and, unlike existing decentralized methods in the LLM setting, it allows to obtain performance competitive with DiLoCo when utilizing multiple local steps. In the heterogeneous bandwidth setting we demonstrate the advantage of GASLoC showing that it can significantly outperform DiLoCo.
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