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Zichang Liu

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6 papers
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6

ICML Conference 2023 Conference Paper

Deja Vu: Contextual Sparsity for Efficient LLMs at Inference Time

  • Zichang Liu
  • Jue Wang
  • Tri Dao
  • Tianyi Zhou 0002
  • Binhang Yuan
  • Zhao Song 0002
  • Anshumali Shrivastava
  • Ce Zhang 0001

Large language models (LLMs) with hundreds of billions of parameters have sparked a new wave of exciting AI applications. However, they are computationally expensive at inference time. Sparsity is a natural approach to reduce this cost, but existing methods either require costly retraining, have to forgo LLM’s in-context learning ability, or do not yield wall-clock time speedup on modern hardware. We hypothesize that contextual sparsity, which are small, input-dependent sets of attention heads and MLP parameters that yield approximately the same output as the dense model for a given input, can address these issues. We show that contextual sparsity exists, that it can be accurately predicted, and that we can exploit it to speed up LLM inference in wall-clock time without compromising LLM’s quality or in-context learning ability. Based on these insights, we propose DejaVu, a system that uses a low-cost algorithm to predict contextual sparsity on the fly given inputs to each layer, along with an asynchronous and hardware-aware implementation that speeds up LLM inference. We validate that DejaVu can reduce the inference latency of OPT-175B by over 2$\times$ compared to the state-of-the-art FasterTransformer, and over 6$\times$ compared to the widely used Hugging Face implementation, without compromising model quality. The code is available at https: //github. com/FMInference/DejaVu.

ICLR Conference 2023 Conference Paper

Learning Multimodal Data Augmentation in Feature Space

  • Zichang Liu
  • Zhiqiang Tang 0001
  • Xingjian Shi
  • Aston Zhang
  • Mu Li 0003
  • Anshumali Shrivastava
  • Andrew Gordon Wilson

The ability to jointly learn from multiple modalities, such as text, audio, and visual data, is a defining feature of intelligent systems. While there have been promising advances in designing neural networks to harness multimodal data, the enormous success of data augmentation currently remains limited to single-modality tasks like image classification. Indeed, it is particularly difficult to augment each modality while preserving the overall semantic structure of the data; for example, a caption may no longer be a good description of an image after standard augmentations have been applied, such as translation. Moreover, it is challenging to specify reasonable transformations that are not tailored to a particular modality. In this paper, we introduce LeMDA, Learning Multimodal Data Augmentation, an easy-to-use method that automatically learns to jointly augment multimodal data in feature space, with no constraints on the identities of the modalities or the relationship between modalities. We show that LeMDA can (1) profoundly improve the performance of multimodal deep learning architectures, (2) apply to combinations of modalities that have not been previously considered, and (3) achieve state-of-the-art results on a wide range of applications comprised of image, text, and tabular data.

NeurIPS Conference 2023 Conference Paper

One-Pass Distribution Sketch for Measuring Data Heterogeneity in Federated Learning

  • Zichang Liu
  • Zhaozhuo Xu
  • Benjamin Coleman
  • Anshumali Shrivastava

Federated learning (FL) is a machine learning paradigm where multiple client devices train models collaboratively without data exchange. Data heterogeneity problem is naturally inherited in FL since data in different clients follow diverse distributions. To mitigate the negative influence of data heterogeneity, we need to start by measuring it across clients. However, the efficient measurement between distributions is a challenging problem, especially in high dimensionality. In this paper, we propose a one-pass distribution sketch to represent the client data distribution. Our sketching algorithm only requires a single pass of the client data, which is efficient in terms of time and memory. Moreover, we show in both theory and practice that the distance between two distribution sketches represents the divergence between their corresponding distributions. Furthermore, we demonstrate with extensive experiments that our distribution sketch improves the client selection in the FL training. We also showcase that our distribution sketch is an efficient solution to the cold start problem in FL for new clients with unlabeled data.

NeurIPS Conference 2023 Conference Paper

Scissorhands: Exploiting the Persistence of Importance Hypothesis for LLM KV Cache Compression at Test Time

  • Zichang Liu
  • Aditya Desai
  • Fangshuo Liao
  • Weitao Wang
  • Victor Xie
  • Zhaozhuo Xu
  • Anastasios Kyrillidis
  • Anshumali Shrivastava

Large language models(LLMs) have sparked a new wave of exciting AI applications. Hosting these models at scale requires significant memory resources. One crucial memory bottleneck for the deployment stems from the context window. It is commonly recognized that model weights are memory hungry; however, the size of key-value embedding stored during the generation process (KV cache) can easily surpass the model size. The enormous size of the KV cache puts constraints on the inference batch size, which is crucial for high throughput inference workload. Inspired by an interesting observation of the attention scores, we hypothesize the persistence of importance: only pivotal tokens, which had a substantial influence at one step, will significantly influence future generations. Based on our empirical verification and theoretical analysis around this hypothesis, we propose scissorhands, a system that maintains the memory usage of the KV cache at a fixed budget without finetuning the model. In essence, Scissorhands manages the KV cache by storing the pivotal tokens with a higher probability. We validate that scissorhands reduces the inference memory usage of the KV cache by up to 5$\times$ without compromising model quality. We further demonstrate that scissorhands can be combined with 4-bit quantization, traditionally used to compress model weights, to achieve up to 20$\times$ compression.

NeurIPS Conference 2022 Conference Paper

Retaining Knowledge for Learning with Dynamic Definition

  • Zichang Liu
  • Benjamin Coleman
  • Tianyi Zhang
  • Anshumali Shrivastava

Machine learning models are often deployed in settings where they must be constantly updated in response to the changes in class definitions while retaining high accuracy on previously learned definitions. A classical use case is fraud detection, where new fraud schemes come one after another. While such an update can be accomplished by re-training on the complete data, the process is inefficient and prevents real-time and on-device learning. On the other hand, efficient methods that incrementally learn from new data often result in the forgetting of previously-learned knowledge. We define this problem as Learning with Dynamic Definition (LDD) and demonstrate that popular models, such as the Vision Transformer and Roberta, exhibit substantial forgetting of past definitions. We present the first practical and provable solution to LDD. Our proposal is a hash-based sparsity model \textit{RIDDLE} that solves evolving definitions by associating samples only to relevant parameters. We prove that our model is a universal function approximator and theoretically bounds the knowledge lost during the update process. On practical tasks with evolving class definition in vision and natural language processing, \textit{RIDDLE} outperforms baselines by up to 30\% on the original dataset while providing competitive accuracy on the update dataset.

ICLR Conference 2021 Conference Paper

MONGOOSE: A Learnable LSH Framework for Efficient Neural Network Training

  • Beidi Chen
  • Zichang Liu
  • Binghui Peng
  • Zhaozhuo Xu
  • Jonathan Lingjie Li
  • Tri Dao
  • Zhao Song 0002
  • Anshumali Shrivastava

Recent advances by practitioners in the deep learning community have breathed new life into Locality Sensitive Hashing (LSH), using it to reduce memory and time bottlenecks in neural network (NN) training. However, while LSH has sub-linear guarantees for approximate near-neighbor search in theory, it is known to have inefficient query time in practice due to its use of random hash functions. Moreover, when model parameters are changing, LSH suffers from update overhead. This work is motivated by an observation that model parameters evolve slowly, such that the changes do not always require an LSH update to maintain performance. This phenomenon points to the potential for a reduction in update time and allows for a modified learnable version of data-dependent LSH to improve query time at a low cost. We use the above insights to build MONGOOSE, an end-to-end LSH framework for efficient NN training. In particular, MONGOOSE is equipped with a scheduling algorithm to adaptively perform LSH updates with provable guarantees and learnable hash functions to improve query efficiency. Empirically, we validate MONGOOSE on large-scale deep learning models for recommendation systems and language modeling. We find that it achieves up to 8% better accuracy compared to previous LSH approaches, with $6.5 \times$ speed-up and $6\times$ reduction in memory usage.

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