Transforming gradients into K-FAC-based coordinates before FP8 quantization reduces communication error and improves downstream task preservation over Euclidean FP8, with a 7.6% end-to-end speedup on 64 GH200 GPUs.
LoCo: Low-Bit Communication Adaptor for Large-scale Model Training
2 Pith papers cite this work, alongside 1 external citations. Polarity classification is still indexing.
abstract
To efficiently train large-scale models, low-bit gradient communication compresses full-precision gradients on local GPU nodes into low-precision ones for higher gradient synchronization efficiency among GPU nodes. However, it often degrades training quality due to compression information loss. To address this, we propose the Low-bit Communication Adaptor (LoCo), which compensates gradients on local GPU nodes before compression, ensuring efficient synchronization without compromising training quality. Specifically, LoCo designs a moving average of historical compensation errors to stably estimate concurrent compression error and then adopts it to compensate for the concurrent gradient compression, yielding a less lossless compression. This mechanism allows it to be compatible with general optimizers like Adam and sharding strategies like FSDP. Theoretical analysis shows that integrating LoCo into full-precision optimizers like Adam and SGD does not impair their convergence speed on nonconvex problems. Experimental results show that across large-scale model training frameworks like Megatron-LM and PyTorch's FSDP, LoCo significantly improves communication efficiency, e.g., improving Adam's training speed by 14% to 40% without performance degradation on large language models like LLAMAs and MoE.
representative citing papers
Opt-Laws predicts LLM final training loss from LR schedules via SDE-derived convergence and escape features, with 94% Top-2 hit rate on held-out schedules and F1=0.92 for divergence detection.
citing papers explorer
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GIFT: Geometry-Informed Low-precision Gradient Communication for LLM Pretraining
Transforming gradients into K-FAC-based coordinates before FP8 quantization reduces communication error and improves downstream task preservation over Euclidean FP8, with a 7.6% end-to-end speedup on 64 GH200 GPUs.
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Optimization Hyper-parameter Laws for Large Language Models
Opt-Laws predicts LLM final training loss from LR schedules via SDE-derived convergence and escape features, with 94% Top-2 hit rate on held-out schedules and F1=0.92 for divergence detection.