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arXiv · 2409.09099

S-STE: Continuous Pruning Function for Efficient 2:4 Sparse Pre-training

Yuezhou Hu·Jun Zhu·Jianfei Chen
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Abstract

Training deep neural networks (DNNs) is costly. Fortunately, Nvidia Ampere and Hopper GPUs can accelerate matrix multiplications twice as fast as a dense equivalent by implementing 2:4 sparsity. However, previous STE-based 2:4 pre-training methods (e.g. STE with hard-thresholding, SR-STE) suffer from optimization difficulties because of discontinuous pruning function. In this study, we comprehensively analyse the bottleneck of traditional N:M sparse training and recognize three drawbacks with discontinuity: incorrect descending direction, inability to predict the amount of descent and sparse mask oscillation. In light of this, we propose S-STE, a simple yet powerful 2:4 training method that contains two parts: to continuously project weights to be 2:4 sparse, and to rescale sparse weights with a per-tensor fixed scaling factor. Besides, we adopt minimum-variance unbiased estimation for activation gradient and FP8 quantization for whole process. Results show that our method surpasses previous 2:4 pre-training recipes and is comparable even with full parameter models. Our toolkit is available at https://github.com/huyz2023/2by4-pretrain.

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Yuezhou Hu, Jun Zhu, Jianfei Chen. 2024-09-13. S-STE: Continuous Pruning Function for Efficient 2:4 Sparse Pre-training. https://arxiv.org/abs/2409.09099

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