FRUGAL: Memory-Efficient Optimization by Reducing State Overhead for Scalable Training

Abstract

With the increase in the number of parameters in large language models, the process of pre-training and fine-tuning 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 (Hu et al., 2021)), low-rank gradient projection (GaLore (Zhao et al., 2024)), and blockwise optimization (BAdam (Luo et al., 2024)) have been proposed. However, in all these algorithms, the $\textit{effective rank of the weight updates remains low-rank}$, 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 $\texttt{FRUGAL}$ ($\textbf{F}$ull-$\textbf{R}$ank $\textbf{U}$pdates with $\textbf{G}$r$\textbf{A}$dient sp$\textbf{L}$itting), a new memory-efficient optimization framework. $\texttt{FRUGAL}$ 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 (Bernstein et al., 2018). 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 across various fixed memory budgets, achieving state-of-the-art results in pre-training and fine-tuning tasks while balancing memory efficiency and performance metrics.