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The Era of 1-bit LLMs: ternary parameters for cost-effective computing

arxiv.org

391–400 of 462 posts

Re: The Era of 1-bit LLMs: ternary parameters for cost-effective computing

#391

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's more likely that Nvidia will offer support to INT2 in the next generation and keep their dominance.

INT2 ternary is equivalent to INT1 + binary mask. Nvidia supprted INT1 matrix multiply in RTX20 and RTX30 generations, nobody used it, so they removed INT1 support from RTX40 generation.

What I get from your comment is now older RTX gens are going to be in high demand soon.

Re: The Era of 1-bit LLMs: ternary parameters for cost-effective computing

#392
post #333

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Is not fully trained" can also mean "we did not figure out how to reach an acceptable loss" or "training was unstable," both of which are common for ML systems.

It probably means that the model is not fully trained, because it is very expensive to train a 70B model, not even Mamba or RWKV have a model that comes close to that size, the leeriness is just kinda silly honestly.

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

That's not to say that a 70B model is necessary, but surely something larger than 3B is doable, especially given that the results of the paper directly imply a significant reduction in memory requirements for training such a model.

Re: The Era of 1-bit LLMs: ternary parameters for cost-effective computing

#393
post #337

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bits are copyable without data loss. Analog properties of individual transistors are less so.

Yes, but the whole point of the link submitted to HN here is that in some applications, like machine learning, precision doesn't matter too much. (However, analog computing is still a bad fit for machine learning, because it requires a lot more power.)

Exact copies aren't just about precision but also about reproducibility.

Re: The Era of 1-bit LLMs: ternary parameters for cost-effective computing

#394
post #333

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It probably means that the model is not fully trained, because it is very expensive to train a 70B model, not even Mamba or RWKV have a model that comes close to that size, the leeriness is just kinda silly honestly.

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. That's not to say that a 70B model is necessary, but surely something larger than 3B is doable, especially given that the results of the paper directly imply a significant reduction in memory requirements for training such a model.

For sure bigger models are needed to compete with transformer LLM, same thing for Mamba, I was just bothered by the distrust about something very reasonable like not being able to fully train a 70B model.

Re: The Era of 1-bit LLMs: ternary parameters for cost-effective computing

#395

I have often mused that, in some ways, it seems like the transistor is really being wasted in AI applications. We use binary states in normal computing to reduce entropy. In AI this is less of a concern, so why not use more of the available voltage range? Basically, re-think the role of the transistor and re-design from the ground up - maybe NAND gates are not the ideal fundamental building block here?

This reminds me of this article[1] recently linked on HN, talking about how Intel had an analog chip for neural nets in the 90s, if I understood correctly

[1] https://thechipletter.substack.com/p/john-c-dvorak-on-intels...

Re: The Era of 1-bit LLMs: ternary parameters for cost-effective computing

#396
post #100

There are two findings I find shocking in this work: * In existing LLMs, we can replace all parameter floating-point values representing real numbers with ternary values representing (-1, 0, 1). * In matrix multiplications (e.g., weights by vectors), we can replace elementwise products in each dot product (a₁b₁ + a₂b₂ ...) with elementwise additions (a₁+b₁ + a₂+b₂ ...), in which signs depend on each value. See the pa…

Fun to see ternary weights making a comeback. This was hot back in 2016 with BinaryConnect and TrueNorth chip from IBM research (disclosure, I was one of the lead chip architects there). Authors seemed to have missed the history. They should at least cite Binary Connect or Straight Through Estimators (not my work). Helpful hint to authors: you can get down to 0.68 bits / weight using a similar technique, good chance…

Thank you. Others on this thread have addressed the citation-trail issues you raise. I just want to tell you how helpful I find your comment about why ternary weights ought to work at all without degrading performance:

> My best guess is that it is encouraging the network to choose good underlying subnetworks to solve the problem, similar to Lottery Ticket Hypothesis. With ternary weights it is just about who connects to who (ie a graph), and not about the individual weight values anymore.

Your guess sounds and feels right to me, even if currently there's no way to express it formally, with the rigor it deserves.

Thank you again for your comment!

Re: The Era of 1-bit LLMs: ternary parameters for cost-effective computing

#397
post #333

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It probably means that the model is not fully trained, because it is very expensive to train a 70B model, not even Mamba or RWKV have a model that comes close to that size, the leeriness is just kinda silly honestly.

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. That's not to say that a 70B model is necessary, but surely something larger than 3B is doable, especially given that the results of the paper directly imply a significant reduction in memory requirements for training such a model.

> results of the paper directly imply a significant reduction in memory requirements for training such a model

Isn't memory use in training higher, since they maintain high precision latent weights in addition to the binarized weights used in the forward pass?

Re: The Era of 1-bit LLMs: ternary parameters for cost-effective computing

#398
People have been doing this 6 years ago.

    https://github.com/yashkant/quantized-nets
    https://github.com/TropComplique/trained-ternary-quantization
    https://github.com/buaabai/Ternary-Weights-Network
I too find it very interesting.

But why this sudden, renewed fuzz?

Re: The Era of 1-bit LLMs: ternary parameters for cost-effective computing

#399
post #100

There are two findings I find shocking in this work: * In existing LLMs, we can replace all parameter floating-point values representing real numbers with ternary values representing (-1, 0, 1). * In matrix multiplications (e.g., weights by vectors), we can replace elementwise products in each dot product (a₁b₁ + a₂b₂ ...) with elementwise additions (a₁+b₁ + a₂+b₂ ...), in which signs depend on each value. See the pa…

Question is whether you can train in this domain or whether you need increased precision to properly represent gradients.

If we could train in this domain it would be an even bigger game changer.

Re: The Era of 1-bit LLMs: ternary parameters for cost-effective computing

#400
post #328
post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This will be big for FPGAs - adders are extremely cheap compared to multipliers and other DSP blocks.

Multipliers for eg 8 bit or 4 bit floating point values should also be pretty cheap? (I assume multipliers have a cost that grows quadratically with the number of bits?)

You use DSPs for that. Effinix has direct bfloat16 support in their FPGAs. The real game changer is using the carry chain with your LUT based adders. Assuming 16 LUTs, you could be getting 11 teraops out of a Ti180 using a few watts. Of course that is just a theoretical number though but I could imagine using four FPGAs for speech recognition and synthesis and vision based LLMs operating in real time.
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