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arXiv · 2506.12037

Exploiting Block Coordinate Descent for Cost-Effective LLM Model Training

Zeyu Liu·Yan Li·Yunquan Zhang·Boyang Zhang·Guoyong Jiang·Xin Zhang·Limin Xiao·Weifeng Zhang·Daning Cheng
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Abstract

Training large language models typically demands extensive GPU memory and substantial financial investment, which poses a barrier for many small- to medium-sized teams. In this paper, we propose a full-parameter pre-training and fine-tuning framework based on block coordinate descent (BCD), enhanced with engineering optimizations, to enable efficient training of large-scale models on cost-effective RTX 4090, A100 and A800 GPU clusters. Under identical hardware configurations, we reduce the training cost of a 7B model to 33% on A100/A800 and only 2.6% on RTX 4090, compared to standard full-parameter training. It also enables large models previously restricted to A100 clusters to be trained on RTX 4090 without degrading performance. BCD achieves comparable or better accuracy than full-parameter and fine-tuning methods at most cases, with lower GPU consumption and improved hardware utilization.

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Zeyu Liu, Yan Li, Yunquan Zhang, Boyang Zhang, Guoyong Jiang, Xin Zhang, Limin Xiao, Weifeng Zhang, Daning Cheng. 2025-05-23. Exploiting Block Coordinate Descent for Cost-Effective LLM Model Training. https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.12037

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