Poster
in
Workshop: Tiny Titans: The next wave of On-Device Learning for Foundation Models (TTODLer-FM)
FRUGAL: Memory-Efficient Optimization by Reducing State Overhead for Scalable Training
Filipp Zmushko · Aleksandr Beznosikov · Martin Takac · Samuel HorvΓ‘th
With the increase in the number of parameters in large language models, the training process increasingly demands larger volumes of GPU memory. A significant portion of this memory is typically consumed by the optimizer state. To overcome this challenge, recent approaches such as low-rank adaptation (LoRA), low-rank gradient projection (GaLore), and blockwise optimization (BAdam) have been proposed. However, in all these algorithms, the effective rank of the weight updates remains low-rank, which can lead to a substantial loss of information from the gradient. This loss can be critically important, especially during the pre-training stage. In this paper, we introduce π΅πππΆπ°π» (Full-Rank Updates with GrAdient spLitting), a new memory-efficient optimization framework. π΅πππΆπ°π» leverages gradient splitting to perform low-dimensional updates using advanced algorithms (such as Adam), while updates along the remaining directions are executed via state-free methods like SGD or signSGD. Our framework can be integrated with various low-rank update selection techniques, including GaLore and BAdam. We provide theoretical convergence guarantees for our framework when using SGDM for low-dimensional updates and SGD for state-free updates. Additionally, our method consistently outperforms concurrent approaches, achieving state-of-the-art results in pre-training and fine-tuning tasks while balancing memory efficiency and performance metrics.