AI Technology & Industry Review
In a new paper LLM Pruning and Distillation in Practice: The Minitron Approach, an NVIDIA research team presents the Minitron compression strategy, which effectively produces a robust 4B model from Llama 3.1 8B and a cutting-edge Mistral-NeMo-Minitron-8B model derived from Mistral NeMo 12B.
In the new paper Rare Gems: Finding Lottery Tickets at Initialization, a research team from Carnegie Mellon University, MBZUAI, Petuum, Inc and the University of Wisconsin-Madison proposes GEM-MINER, an algorithm that finds sparse subnetworks at initialization trainable to accuracy that is comparable or better than iterative magnitude pruning (IMP) with warm-up.
An Intel research team presents Prune Once for All (Prune OFA), a training method that leverages weight pruning and model distillation to produce pretrained transformer-based language models with high sparsity ratios. Applied to BERT, the approach achieves state-of-the-art results in compression-to-accuracy ratio.
A research team from Microsoft, Zhejiang University, Johns Hopkins University, Georgia Institute of Technology and University of Denver proposes Only-Train-Once (OTO), a one-shot DNN training and pruning framework that produces a slim architecture from a full heavy model without fine-tuning while maintaining high performance.
A research team from Georgia Tech, Microsoft Research and Microsoft Azure AI studies the collections of “lottery tickets” in extremely over-parametrized models, revealing the generalization performance pattern of winning tickets and proving the existence of “super tickets.”