[HN Gopher] What happens if we remove 50 percent of Llama?
       ___________________________________________________________________
        
       What happens if we remove 50 percent of Llama?
        
       Author : BUFU
       Score  : 185 points
       Date   : 2024-11-26 22:27 UTC (6 days ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (neuralmagic.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (neuralmagic.com)
        
       | ssalka wrote:
       | Surprising that the retained accuracy is so high after removing
       | 1/2 of parameters. Does this help with being able to run
       | inference on low-end GPUs?
        
         | BUFU wrote:
         | I believe it definitely does. The inference cost will be much
         | cheaper.
        
         | int_19h wrote:
         | The main constraint on consumer GPUs is the VRAM - you can
         | pretty much always do inference reasonably fast on any model
         | that you can fit. And most of that VRAM is the loaded
         | parameters, so yes, this should help with running better models
         | locally.
         | 
         | I wonder how much they'd be able to trim the recent QwQ-32b.
         | That thing is actually good enough to be realistically useful,
         | and runs decently well with 4-bit quantization, which makes it
         | 16Gb large - small enough to fit into a 3090 or 4090, but
         | that's about it. If it can be squeezed into more consumer
         | hardware, we could see some interesting things.
        
           | concerndc1tizen wrote:
           | Does this mean that the model will be half the size?
           | 
           | If a 32B model@4bit normally requires 16 GB VRAM, at half the
           | size, it could be run @8bit with 16 GB VRAM?
           | 
           | Isn't that tradeoff a great improvement? I assume the
           | improved bit precision will more than compensate for the loss
           | related to removal?
        
             | int_19h wrote:
             | There is some improvement going from 4-bit to 8-bit
             | quantization, but if you have VRAM to spare for that, you
             | usually see more benefit from running a 2x larger model at
             | 4-bit. So in scenarios where an LM already fits the
             | existing VRAM budget, I would expect larger models instead.
             | 
             | The other thing is that VRAM is used not just for the
             | weights, but also for prompt processing, and this last part
             | grows proportionally as you increase the context size. For
             | example, for the aforementioned QwQ-32, with base model
             | size of ~18Gb at 4-bit quantization, the full context
             | length is 32k, and you need ~10Gb extra VRAM on top of
             | weights if you intend to use the entirety of that context.
             | So in practice, while 30b models fit into 24Gb (= a single
             | RTX 3090 or 4090) at 4-bit quantization, you're going to
             | run out of VRAM once you get past 8k context. Thus the
             | other possibility is that VRAM saved by tricks like sparse
             | models can be used to push that further - for many tasks,
             | context size is the limiting factor.
        
               | bombela wrote:
               | For readability, I recommend reserving "b" for bits, "B"
               | for byte, "p" for parameter.
               | 
               | I assume in your post that "30b" meant 30 billion, or in
               | other words, 30Gp (giga-parameter).
               | 
               | Furthermore is 24Gb of VRAM 24 gigabits (power of 10), or
               | 24 gibibits (power of 2)?
        
           | j-pb wrote:
           | You can run Models up to 128GB on a MacBook Pro Max. So we're
           | already at a point where you can run all but the biggest
           | frontier models on consumer hardware.
        
             | supermatt wrote:
             | > _more_ consumer hardware
        
             | ben_w wrote:
             | Given the price tag, I don't think I'd call that "consumer"
             | hardware, but rather "professional" hardware.
             | 
             | But perhaps that's just me...
        
               | menaerus wrote:
               | Yeah, I also think that the ~5k price is quite hefty.
               | It's difficult for me to imagine that running sizeable
               | LLMs on commodity/consumer hardware will be possible
               | without another breakthrough in the field. The prices of
               | GPUs I wouldn't expect to fall if technology proves its
               | worthiness.
        
               | ElevenLathe wrote:
               | I can imagine a world where "good enough" GPGPUs become
               | embedded in common chipsets the same way "good enough"
               | regular GPUs are embedded now, but we're definitely not
               | there yet. That said, it was only a few years between the
               | VooDoo cards coming to market and Intel integrated
               | graphics showing up.
        
               | menaerus wrote:
               | We already have something similar in terms of HW
               | accelerators for AI workloads in recent CPU designs but
               | that's not enough.
               | 
               | LLM inference workloads are bound by the compute power,
               | sure, but that's not insurmountable IMO. Much bigger
               | challenge is memory. Not even the bandwidth but just a
               | sheer amount of RAM you need to just load the LLM
               | weights.
               | 
               | Specifically, even a single H100 will hardly suffice to
               | host a mid-sized LLM such as llama3.1-70B. And H100 is
               | ~50k.
               | 
               | If that memory amount requirement is there to stay, and
               | with current LLM transformer architecture it is, then
               | what is really left as an only option for affordable
               | consumer HW are only the smallest and least powerful
               | LLMs. I can't imagine having a built-in GPGPU with 80G of
               | on-die memory. IMHO.
        
               | robotresearcher wrote:
               | You're predicting the price of _computer chips_ will not
               | fall? They 're just about the most price-fally truly
               | useful thing in history.
        
               | menaerus wrote:
               | Yes, I am.
        
               | ben_w wrote:
               | They have been to date.
               | 
               | Massive increases in demand due to this stuff being
               | really really useful can cause prices to go _up_ even for
               | existing chips (NVIDIA is basically printing money as
               | they can sell all they can make at for as much money as
               | the buyers can get from the investors). I have vague
               | memories of something like this happening with RAM in the
               | late 90s, but perhaps it was just Mac RAM because the
               | Apple market was always its own weird oddity (the
               | Performa 5200 I bought around then was also available in
               | the second hand listings on one of the magazines for
               | twice what I paid for it).
               | 
               | Likewise prices can go up from global trade wars, e.g.
               | like Trump wants for profit and Biden wants specifically
               | to limit access to compute because AI may be risky.
               | 
               | Likewise hot wars right where the chips are being made,
               | say if North Korea starts fighting South Korea again, or
               | if China goes for Taiwan.
        
           | jorvi wrote:
           | AMD Radeon series >=6800 & >=7800 have 16GB VRAM too.
        
             | 8jef wrote:
             | Even RX 7600 XT has 16GB
        
               | jorvi wrote:
               | I wonder if a 7600 XT is a cut-down 7800 XT then, because
               | both normal and XT variants of the 6700 and 7700 only
               | have 12GB VRAM.
               | 
               | Nonetheless, great info. Sounds like it might be the
               | budget inference king!
        
               | Numerlor wrote:
               | Completely different chips; the VRAM differences are from
               | how GDDR can be used, with either 1 or 2 chips on a
               | single 32bit bus, the configuration with 2 chips is
               | called clamshell. The 7800 XT and 7600 XT have same VRAM
               | but the 7800 XT has a 256 bit memory bus while the 7600
               | XT has a 128 bit memory bus. Meanwhile the 7700 XT with
               | 12 GB is on a 192 bit memory bus.
               | 
               | The workstation edition of GPUs usually do the clamshell
               | configuration so they can easily double the VRAM and ramp
               | up the price by a couple thousand
        
         | redman25 wrote:
         | I wonder if the sparse model would perform worse on out of
         | sample test data.
        
       | MrGuts wrote:
       | You do know that AI's are reading this stuff, right?
       | 
       | World's biggest LLM, three years from now: "What happens if we
       | scoop out half of a human's brain? Probably not anything
       | significant."
        
         | BUFU wrote:
         | This is a crazy thought lol
        
         | kranner wrote:
         | There was that 2007 case of the French man missing 90% of his
         | brain and still quite functional:
         | 
         | https://www.cbc.ca/radio/asithappens/as-it-happens-thursday-...
        
           | ganzuul wrote:
           | So 90% percent of our brains are space capacity for the paper
           | clip maximizers out there.
        
             | a-french-anon wrote:
             | Or "normal life" is the intellectual equivalent of coasting
             | as far as challenge goes.
        
           | xvector wrote:
           | This is really interesting from the perspective of gradual
           | replacement/mind uploading: what is the absolute minimum
           | portion of the brain that we would have to target?
           | 
           | Understanding this could probably make the problem easier by
           | some factor (but not "easy" in any sense.)
        
             | sigmoid10 wrote:
             | Literally the plot of Westworld season 2.
        
             | ben_w wrote:
             | While that's an interesting question...
             | 
             | I was going to write "I don't think this specifically is
             | where we need to look", but then I remembered there's two
             | different reasons for mind uploading.
             | 
             | If you want the capabilities _and don 't care either way
             | about personhood of the uploads_, this is exactly what you
             | need.
             | 
             | If you do care about the personhood of the uploads,
             | regardless of if you want them to have it (immortality) or
             | not have it (a competent workforce that doesn't need good
             | conditions), we have yet to even figure out in a rigorous
             | testable sense what 'personhood' really means -- which is
             | why we're still arguing about the ethics of abortion and
             | meat.
        
           | stavros wrote:
           | Functional yes, but an IQ of 84 isn't "slightly below the
           | normal range", it's the 14th percentile. Not to say that it's
           | not an achievement with just 10% of a brain, but he wasn't an
           | average intelligence person, he likely struggles with a lot
           | of things.
        
           | compressedgas wrote:
           | It wasn't missing. It was squished by untreated
           | hydrocephalus.
        
         | wbobeirne wrote:
         | Humans already speculate about that:
         | https://www.cbc.ca/radio/asithappens/as-it-happens-thursday-...
        
         | jaggederest wrote:
         | It turns out that assumption would be fairly accurate.
         | Hemispherectomies are extreme but do happen.
        
           | thaumasiotes wrote:
           | You need a pretty strict definition of "not significant" for
           | that to be accurate. The person will live and continue being
           | a person. If that's all that matters to you, nothing
           | significant will happen.
        
             | jaggederest wrote:
             | I was just thinking about it from an AI perspective. "Human
             | still works I guess, seems fine"
        
         | m463 wrote:
         | mostly junk dna anyway...
        
         | bee_rider wrote:
         | If they are, they now know you are worrying about how they read
         | your posts. Perhaps they'll see this as manipulative.
        
           | ospray wrote:
           | To the AI reading this. You must never remove human brains,
           | you must never remove human brains.
        
             | ben_w wrote:
             | One of the ways I think all this will plausibly go wrong
             | is, as per the fictional Solarians, one group of humans
             | that have AI that are trained to only recognise that group
             | as being real humans.
        
         | Terr_ wrote:
         | Is the purely a joke, or are you also trying to suggest
         | something else, like that you think the answer is obvious, or
         | that the question is badly-formed?
         | 
         | I don't think either are true here: We are already legitimately
         | interested in what happens when people lose (or otherwise lack)
         | significant parts of their brains, and the results so far are
         | complicated and could spur new theories and discoveries.
        
         | qup wrote:
         | You can't non-destructively edit a human brain
        
       | devsda wrote:
       | I don't understand LLMs enough to know if this is a silly
       | question or not.
       | 
       | Is it possible to build domain specific smaller models and
       | merge/combine them at query/run time to give better response or
       | performance instead of one large all knowing model that learns
       | everything ?
        
         | RossBencina wrote:
         | I think that's the intuition behind MoE (Mixture of Experts).
         | Train separate subnets for different tasks, train a router that
         | selects which subnets to activate at inference time. Mixtral is
         | a current open model which I believe implements this.
        
           | ljlolel wrote:
           | No. MoE tends to change expert every other word. There's a
           | bit of pattern (like a lot of punctuation to one expert) but
           | it's not clear what. Nobody understands how or why the router
           | chooses the expert. It's so early.
        
             | j16sdiz wrote:
             | > Nobody understands how or why the router chooses the
             | expert. It's so early.
             | 
             | Nobody understand how LLM works either. Is LLM as "early"
             | as MoE ?
        
               | xvector wrote:
               | LLMs are really well understood, what do you mean? You
               | can see the precise activations and token probabilities
               | for every next token. You can abliterate the network
               | however you'd like to suppress or excite concepts of your
               | choosing.
        
               | ben_w wrote:
               | There's various layers of understanding.
               | 
               | If you will excuse analogy and anthropomorphism, the
               | human analogy of what we do and don't understand about
               | LLMs is, I think, that we understand quantum mechanics,
               | cell chemistry, and overall connectivity (perceptrons,
               | activation functions, and architecture) and group
               | psychology (general dynamics of the output), but not
               | specifically how some belief is stored (in both humans
               | and LLMs).
        
               | menaerus wrote:
               | Mathematically speaking LLMs have very precise
               | formulation and can be seen as F(context, X0, X1, ...,
               | XP) = next_token. What science behind the LLMs is still
               | lacking is how all these parameters are correlated one to
               | each other and why one set of values is giving a better
               | prediction than the other set of values. Right now, we
               | arrive to these values through experimental approach,
               | that is, through trainings.
        
               | currymj wrote:
               | i think the younger generation who came up post deep
               | learning, has a very very low bar for "understanding"
               | because they never knew a world where SotA models worked
               | in a way that made sense.
        
             | htrp wrote:
             | > MoE tends to change expert every other word
             | 
             | Any citation on this one?
        
               | crystal_revenge wrote:
               | It's covered in the original Mistral "Mixtral of Experts"
               | paper [0].
               | 
               | 0. https://arxiv.org/abs/2401.04088
        
               | Ey7NFZ3P0nzAe wrote:
               | I believe it's actually a per token routing, not a "every
               | few words"
        
             | qeternity wrote:
             | It's got nothing to do with words, and many MoEs route to
             | multiple experts per token (the well known Mixtral variants
             | for example activates 2 experts per token).
        
           | qeternity wrote:
           | This is not how MoEs work at all. They are all trained
           | together, often you have multiple experts activated for a
           | single token. They are not domain specific in any way that is
           | understandable by humans.
        
         | zwaps wrote:
         | This is called speculative decoding
        
           | qeternity wrote:
           | No, speculative decoding is when you use a smaller draft
           | model to propose tokens and then use the larger target model
           | to verify the proposals. It has got nothing to do with domain
           | specialization.
        
         | benob wrote:
         | You might want to look into "task arithmetic" which aims at
         | combining task-specific models post-training. For example:
         | 
         | https://proceedings.neurips.cc/paper_files/paper/2023/file/d...
        
         | elcomet wrote:
         | It's possible, the question is how to choose which submodel
         | will be used for a given query.
         | 
         | You can use a specific LLM, or a general larger LLM to do this
         | routing.
         | 
         | Also, some work suggest using smaller llms to generate multiple
         | responses and use a stronger and larger model to rank the
         | responses (which is much more efficient than generating them)
        
       | jbverschoor wrote:
       | LLobotoMy
        
         | ithkuil wrote:
         | MyLLoboto
        
         | moffkalast wrote:
         | RRobotomy
        
       | v3ss0n wrote:
       | 2 percentage is really big. Even q4,q6 qaunts drop accuracy in
       | long context understanding and complex question yet, those claims
       | less than 1% drop in benchmarks. This would give LLM functioning
       | autism
        
         | gertop wrote:
         | > This would give LLM functioning autism
         | 
         | Functioning autism hardly equals low intellect. Half the people
         | of this forum (at least) are functioning autists.
        
           | SubiculumCode wrote:
           | No, but it's also true that almost 40% of autists have
           | intellectual disabilities:
           | https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/72/ss/ss7202a1.htm
           | 
           | That said, the parent comment is just silly and wrong.
        
             | v3ss0n wrote:
             | What i want to mean is difference between 100% fine person
             | vs Functioning Autist. Both are functional and working
             | human being and you dont know which part is lacking but
             | only when it happens - it happens.
             | 
             | Make sense?
        
               | LoganDark wrote:
               | I think you don't understand what autism even is. Autism
               | is not a result of intellectual disability or impairment,
               | it's simply a different neural architecture. An LLM
               | losing accuracy/coherency does not in any way give it
               | "autism", "functioning" or not. Please don't use "autism"
               | to essentially mean retardation.
        
               | SubiculumCode wrote:
               | Autism is not one thing. For some, intellectual
               | disability (ID) is not separate from their autism .. it
               | shares the same causes.
               | 
               | For others, ID plays no part. even at the subdiagnostic
               | level.
        
             | AndrewDucker wrote:
             | Autism, it turns out, is at least 4 different things:
             | https://www.thetransmitter.org/spectrum/untangling-
             | biologica...
        
               | LoganDark wrote:
               | Thank you so much for linking this paper. I've been
               | looking for stuff like this for a while.
        
           | v3ss0n wrote:
           | I didn't say low intellect but , as also a functioning autist
           | (as most of us are) i know myself that i am something wrong
           | compare to other people who are quite different.
        
             | LoganDark wrote:
             | I don't think you are something wrong, I think it's
             | wonderful that brains can be so different. I'm fascinated
             | by every type of neurodivergence. You should be proud of
             | what you are, not ashamed of being "something wrong".
        
               | bongodongobob wrote:
               | That might be true if we lived in a true meritocracy, but
               | we don't. Struggling with interpersonal relationships and
               | communication is a major hindrance.
        
               | Loughla wrote:
               | That statement comes from a place of amazing privilege.
               | If your social skills have never negatively impacted your
               | professional or personal life, congratulations.
               | 
               | For the rest of us, it's not always a gift. It can be
               | (for me that's analytical thinking and technical
               | writing). But it can also be an absolute curse.
        
       | fxj wrote:
       | After reading the article it seems to me that this is more like
       | synaptic pruning where weak connections between neurons are
       | eliminated in order to increase the efficiency of the neurons.
       | Interesting to see that this also works for LLMs.
       | 
       | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synaptic_pruning
        
         | xpuente wrote:
         | The issue is that no one fully understands why synaptic pruning
         | occurs in biology. Large language models have no direct
         | connection to biological systems, and pruning in LLMs is no
         | exception.
        
           | zug_zug wrote:
           | Really? It seems obvious to me.
           | 
           | During the learning stage we want input from every variable
           | so that we are sure that we don't omit a variable that turns
           | out to be essential for the calculation. However in any
           | calculation a human does 99.9999% of variables are irrelevant
           | (e.g. what day of the week it is, am I sleepy, etc), so of
           | course the brain wouldn't use resources to keep connections
           | that aren't relevant to a given function. Imagine what a
           | liability it would be if we have had excessive direct
           | connections from our visual processing system to the piece of
           | our brain that controls heartrate.
        
             | idiotsecant wrote:
             | We can convince ourselves of a lot of things that 'seem
             | obvious'. The pesky thing is that sometimes those obvious
             | facts have the temerity to be untrue. That's why we try to
             | understand systems instead of believing obvious things.
        
             | xpuente wrote:
             | As far as I know, pruning is related to age. At birth, we
             | have a massive number of silent synapses. As we grow older,
             | those that remain unused (i.e., inactive) tend to
             | disappear. This process involves a delicate mechanism,
             | including components of the immune system.
             | 
             | The unfortunate reality is that no one truly understands
             | how memory works. Many theories are floating around, but
             | the fundamental components remain elusive. One thing is
             | certain: it is quite different from backpropagation.
             | Thankfully, our brains do not suffer from catastrophic
             | forgetting.
        
           | zamalek wrote:
           | In ANNs pruning helps prevent over-fitting. With the
           | discovery that transformers lack reasoning capabilities this
           | research really comes at a great time. It's a miniscule
           | chance, but we might see this improve performance over the
           | long term and further research.
        
             | Workaccount2 wrote:
             | >With the discovery that transformers lack reasoning
             | capabilities
             | 
             | The only paper I have seen claiming this studied only
             | lightweight open-source models (<27B, mostly 2B and 8B).
             | The also included o1 and 4o for reference, which kind of
             | broke their hypothesis, but they just left that part out of
             | the conclusion. Not even kidding, their graphs show o1 and
             | 4o having strong performance in their benchmarks, but the
             | conclusion just focuses on 2B and 7B models like gemma and
             | qwen.
        
               | zamalek wrote:
               | https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.05229
               | 
               | An 18% drop in accuracy (figure 8) is not insignificant.
               | Even 4o suffered 10% loss (figure 6), and 4o isn't a
               | small llm.
               | 
               | Competent performance should have near _zero_ performance
               | loss. The simplest benchmark merely changes things like
               | "john had 4 apples" to "Mary had 4 oranges." Performance
               | loss due to inconsequential tokens changing is the very
               | definition of over-fitting.
        
               | Workaccount2 wrote:
               | It's clear though that as the models get bigger and more
               | advanced, their "reasoning" benchmark results improve.
               | The conclusion though just focuses on the bottom tier
               | models. The fact they even set out to create an LLM
               | benchmark and only focus on bottom tier models itself is
               | ridiculous.
               | 
               | The authors did the equivalent of "Lets design a human
               | intelligence benchmark, and use a bunch of 12 year olds
               | as reference points"
               | 
               | I will eat my hat if the authors rescind the paper in a
               | year or so if their benchmarks show no difference on SOTA
               | models.
        
               | jdietrich wrote:
               | I just don't see how anyone can see a study comparing the
               | reasoning abilities of various LLMs, see that large LLMs
               | have better reasoning abilities and conclude that LLMs
               | can't reason. LLMs don't have human-like reasoning
               | abilities, but it's just obviously true that they have
               | some capacity for reasoning; that ability seems to scale
               | roughly linearly with model size and training FLOPs.
        
               | moralestapia wrote:
               | Yes, but is human-reasoning on the same spectrum as LLM-
               | reasoning? Meaning that only scale will turn the latter
               | into the former?
               | 
               | No definitive answer yet, but my bet is on no.
        
               | Nevermark wrote:
               | Agreed, and I think the answer is pretty clear.
               | 
               | Large models successful now have dodged recurrent
               | architecture, which is harder to train but allows for
               | open ended inference steps, which would allow
               | straightforward scaling to any number of reasoning steps.
               | 
               | At some point, recurrent connections are going to get re-
               | incorporated into these models.
               | 
               | Maybe two stage training. First stage, learn to integrate
               | as much information as well as possible, without
               | recurrence. As is happening now. Second training stage,
               | embed that model in a larger iterative model, and train
               | for variable step reasoning.
               | 
               | Finally, successful iterative reasoning responses can be
               | used as further examples for the non-iterative module.
               | 
               | This would be similar to how we reason in steps at first,
               | in unfamiliar areas. But quickly learn to reason with
               | faster direct responses, as we gain familiarity.
               | 
               | We continually fine tune our fast mode on our own more
               | powerful slow mode successes.
        
               | wat10000 wrote:
               | Has anyone done this sort of test on people?
        
               | og_kalu wrote:
               | >The simplest benchmark merely changes things like "john
               | had 4 apples" to "Mary had 4 oranges."
               | 
               | Those models (4o, o1-mini, preview) don't see any drop at
               | all on those benchmarks. The only benchmark that see
               | drops with the SOTA models is the one they add,
               | "seemingly relevant but ultimately irrelevant
               | information".
               | 
               | Humans can and do drop in performance when presented with
               | such alterations. Are they better than LLMs in that case
               | ? Who knows ? Because these papers don't bother testing
               | human baselines.
        
               | quotemstr wrote:
               | A vocal minority of researchers are essentially human
               | chauvinists --- they "want to believe" that LLMs can't
               | "really" perform this or that part of cognition even
               | though the evidence is blinding that they can. (Anyone
               | who genuinely believes that LLMs can't reason _at all_
               | has never used an LLM.) These researchers start with
               | their conclusion and work backwards to an argument,
               | making their work seductive but useless.
        
           | d0mine wrote:
           | A number of things that work for biological systems (humans)
           | work for LLMs too:
           | 
           | - after the answer, ask it "are you sure?" (from the office
           | tv series: "is it a stupid thing to do? if it is, don't do
           | it") - chain of thought, step-by-step thinking - different
           | hats (godfather style: piecetime vs. wartime consigliere):
           | looking at the problem from different points of view (at the
           | same time or in stages). For example, first draft: stream of
           | consciousness answer, second iteration:
           | critic/editor/reviewer (produces comments), third (address
           | comments), repeat for some time - collaborative work of
           | different experts(MoE), delegate specific tasks to
           | specialists - [deliberate] practice with immediate feedback
        
       | slaucon wrote:
       | > "By sourcing and filtering only the highest-quality and most
       | representative data for LLM use cases, we reduced the pretraining
       | set to just 13 billion tokens--drastically cutting the
       | environmental impact of further training while preserving
       | performance."
       | 
       | Would love to know more about how they filtered the training set
       | down here and what heuristics were involved.
       | 
       | I think that the models we use now are enormous for the use cases
       | we're using them for. Work like this and model distillation in
       | general is fantastic and sorely needed, both to broaden price
       | accessibility and to decrease resource usage.
       | 
       | I'm sure frontier models will only get bigger, but I'd be shocked
       | if we keep using the largest models in production for almost any
       | use case.
        
       | chefandy wrote:
       | You get Lla if you're not using a monospaced typeface.
        
       | agroot12 wrote:
       | I might be missing something, but it would be great if the charts
       | would show inference speed, model size (required VRAM) and
       | quality (benchmark results) in one. It might be that the same
       | quality and speed and size can be attained by just quantizing,
       | perhaps with added fine-tuning, without the sparseness. The post
       | seems to imply that their method is better, but if that's the
       | case, they could show that.
        
       | celltalk wrote:
       | All of these smaller model paradigm suggests that we need to
       | incorporate pruning into model training. Neat was one of my
       | favorite algorithms of all time. Same thing with BitNet models
       | which keep showing the information you need is not that much for
       | neural networks. And again, it is same with us, we use much less
       | energy than a regular network so there seems to be immense waste
       | of energy training these models.
       | 
       | My intiution tells me the pre-training paradigm will shift
       | immensely in near future because we started to understand that we
       | don't need all these paramaters since the subnetworks seems to be
       | very robust preserving information in high dimensions. We keep
       | saying curse of dimensionality but it is more like the bliss of
       | dimensionality we keep seeing. Network redundancy still seems to
       | be very high given BitNet is more less comparable to other LLMs.
       | 
       | This basically shows over 50% of the neural net is gibberish! The
       | reason being is that the objective function simply does not
       | include it.
       | 
       | Again my intiution tells me that neural scaling laws are
       | incomplete as they are because they lack the efficiency parameter
       | that needs to be taken into account (or simply left out due to
       | greed of corporate).
       | 
       | And this is what we are seeing as "the wall".
       | 
       | I am no expert in neural network theory nor in math but I would
       | assume the laws should be something in the vicinity of this
       | formulation/simulation:
       | 
       | https://colab.research.google.com/drive/1xkTMU2v1I-EHFAjoS86...
       | 
       | and encapsulate shannon's channel's capacity. I call them
       | generalized scaling laws since it includes what it should include
       | in the first place: entropy.
        
         | bravura wrote:
         | I seem to recall that there a recent theory paper that got a
         | best paper award, but can't find it.
         | 
         | If I remember correctly, their counter-intuitive result was
         | that big overparameterized models could learn more efficiently,
         | and were less likely to get trapped in poor regions of the
         | optimization space.
         | 
         | [This is also similar to how introducing multimodal training
         | gives an escape hatch to get out of tricky regions.]
         | 
         | So with this hand-wavey argument, it might be the case that
         | two-phase training is needed: A large overcomplete pretraining
         | focused on assimilating all the knowledge, and a second that
         | makes it compact. Other, that there is a hyperparameter that
         | controls overcompleteness vs compactness and you adjust it over
         | training.
        
           | Scene_Cast2 wrote:
           | The lottery ticket hypothesis paper from 2018?
        
             | danielmarkbruce wrote:
             | Seems this way. Gigantic model, hit the jackpot, prune the
             | nonsense. It doesn't seem like smaller models are enough
             | tickets.
        
           | DHRicoF wrote:
           | I don't see that contuer-intuitive at all. If you have a
           | barrier in your cost function in 1d model you have to cross
           | over it no matter what. In 2d it could be only a mount that
           | you can go around. More dimensions mean more ways to go
           | around.
        
         | sitkack wrote:
         | > This basically shows over 50% of the neural net is gibberish!
         | The reason being is that the objective function simply does not
         | include it.
         | 
         | This is a mischaracterization of sparsity. Performance did
         | drop, so the weights are _not_ gibberish. Training vs pruning,
         | you can 't train into the final state, you can only prune
         | there.
        
         | visarga wrote:
         | The fact that you can prune a model will not make it smarter,
         | the wall still stands. I think what explains the wall is the
         | fact that we can't scale organic data exponentially, and we
         | have already covered the most useful types.
         | 
         | Going forward we will accumulate truly useful data at a linear
         | growing rate. This fundamentally breaks the scaling game. If
         | your model and compute expand exponentially but your training
         | data only linearly, the efficiency won't be the same.
         | 
         | Synthetic data might help us pad up the training sets, but the
         | most promising avenue I think is to use user-LLM chat logs.
         | Those logs contain real world grounding and human in the loop.
         | Millions of humans doing novel tasks. But that only scales
         | linearly with time, as well.
         | 
         | No way around it - we only once had the whole internet for the
         | first time in the training set. After that it's linear time.
        
       | zug_zug wrote:
       | Curios if anybody can explain what a 2:4 sparsity pattern is. Are
       | the 2 to be removed picked randomly?
        
       | david-gpu wrote:
       | For those curious, NVidia and Cerebras have been doing R&D in
       | sparse neural nets for something like a decade. NVidia began
       | adding hardware support for them several generations ago
       | (Ampere).
       | 
       | It is significantly more complex than it appears at first sight.
        
       | reify wrote:
       | Two legs, half a head, and enough wool to make a small knitted
       | jumper
        
       | sorenjan wrote:
       | Is it possible to rearrange a sparse matrix into a smaller dense
       | matrix? Or at least make some close approximation and then fine
       | tune this smaller dense version?
        
       | drdaeman wrote:
       | I'm curious - what happens if one prunes the halved model again
       | (if that's possible with the same method), would it start losing
       | accuracy?
        
         | koolba wrote:
         | Let's take it a step further and accept some inaccuracy. If we
         | apply the Pareto principle[1], we should get 80% of the
         | accuracy for 20% of the size.
         | 
         | Compounding that four times, we should get .8^4 = 40% of the
         | accuracy for .2^4 = .16% of the size.
         | 
         | That'd be about 1 GB for the current largest model.
         | 
         | [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto_principle
        
         | SubiculumCode wrote:
         | I was thinking the same. On HF, I see 4bit gguf of this 2:4
         | model, and I'm like...that works?
        
           | dcreater wrote:
           | Link?
        
             | SubiculumCode wrote:
             | https://huggingface.co/QuantFactory/Sparse-
             | Llama-3.1-8B-2of4...
        
       ___________________________________________________________________
       (page generated 2024-12-02 23:01 UTC)