FBLayout: Optimizing Memory Layout for Efficient LLM Finetuning on Mobile GPUs

Abstract

Transformer-based models have enabled unprecedented capabilities across language, vision, and multimodal tasks. On-device fine-tuning of transformer models offers a privacy-preserving path to personalized AI, yet remains inefficient on mobile GPUs due to severe memory constraints and frequent layout transformations in attention mechanism during training. Existing mobile training frameworks either use unified layouts for forward and backward passes -- leading to fragmented memory access and poor GPU utilization during backpropagation -- or rely on explicit layout conversions, which introduce significant transformation overhead. To overcome this, we propose FBLayout, a layout-aware framework that co-designs tensor organization with mobile GPU platforms. FBLayout introduces: (1) a unified R-Tile layout for multi-dimensional reductions across forward/backward passes; (2) tile-based index transformation to eliminate physical data movement; and (3) activation-guided layout selection to propagate efficient layouts globally. Evaluations on seven transformer models across different mobile phones (including ARM Mali and Qualcomm Adreno GPUs) show that FBLayout achieves 2.2-5.7x speedup over MNN, TFLite, and TVM, while significantly improving cache efficiency and reducing memory footprint, enabling practical on-device large model fine-tuning.