Fast Forwarding Low-Rank Training
Abstract: Parameter efficient finetuning methods like low-rank adaptation (LoRA) aim to reduce the computational costs of finetuning pretrained Language Models (LMs). Enabled by these low-rank settings, we propose an even more efficient optimization strategy: Fast Forward, a simple and effective approach to accelerate large segments of SGD training. In a Fast Forward stage, we repeat the most recent optimizer step until the loss stops improving on a tiny validation set. By alternating between regular optimization steps and Fast Forward stages, Fast Forward provides up to an 87\% reduction in FLOPs over standard SGD with Adam.
We validate Fast Forward by finetuning various models on different tasks and demonstrate that it speeds up training without compromising model performance. Additionally, we analyze when and how to apply Fast Forward.
Paper Type: Short
Research Area: Efficient/Low-Resource Methods for NLP
Research Area Keywords: parameter-efficient-training, NLP in resource-constrained settings, finetuning
Contribution Types: Approaches to low-resource settings, Approaches low compute settings-efficiency
Languages Studied: English
Submission Number: 4199
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