Large Language Models (LLMs) built on the Transformer architecture have recently attained important technological milestones. The remarkable skills of these models in comprehending and producing writing that resembles that of a human have had a significant impact on a variety of Artificial Intelligence (AI) applications. Although these models function admirably, there are many obstacles to successfully implementing them in low-resource contexts. The industry has given this problem a lot of attention, particularly in situations when access to GPU hardware resources is constrained. In these kinds of situations, CPU-based alternatives become essential.
Improving inference performance is crucial to reducing costs and getting past the limitations of scarce hardware resources. In a recent research, a team of researchers has presented an easy-to-deploy approach that improves the inference performance of LLMs on CPUs. This solution’s implementation of a practical way to lower the KV cache size without sacrificing accuracy is one of its main features. In order to guarantee that LLMs can operate well even with limited resources, this optimization is essential.
The study has also suggested a technique for distributed inference optimization that makes use of the oneAPI Collective Communications Library. By facilitating effective communication and processing among numerous CPUs, this method greatly improves the scalability and performance of LLMs. Moreover, tailored optimizations for the most popular models are covered, guaranteeing that the solution is flexible and suitable for a variety of LLMs. The goal of putting these optimizations into practice is to speed up LLMs on CPUs, which will increase their affordability and accessibility for deployment in low-resource settings.
The team has summarized their primary contributions as follows.
- The team has provided unique LLM optimization methods on CPUs, such as SlimAttention. These methods are compatible with popular models such as Qwen, Llama, ChatGLM, Baichuan, and the Opt series and feature distinct optimizations for LLM procedures and layers.
- A workable strategy has been suggested to reduce the KV cache size without sacrificing accuracy. This method improves memory efficiency without appreciably degrading the output quality of the model.
- Specifically for LLMs on CPUs, the team has developed a distributed inference optimization approach. This method is suitable for large-scale applications since it guarantees scalability and effective low-latency inference.
Check out the Paper and GitHub. All credit for this research goes to the researchers of this project. Also, don’t forget to follow us on Twitter.
Join our Telegram Channel and LinkedIn Group.
If you like our work, you will love our newsletter..
Don’t Forget to join our 46k+ ML SubReddit
Tanya Malhotra is a final year undergrad from the University of Petroleum & Energy Studies, Dehradun, pursuing BTech in Computer Science Engineering with a specialization in Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning.
She is a Data Science enthusiast with good analytical and critical thinking, along with an ardent interest in acquiring new skills, leading groups, and managing work in an organized manner.
