Training of large neural networks requires significant computational resources. Despite advances using low-rank adapters and quantization, pretraining of models such as LLMs on consumer hardware has not been possible without model sharding, offloading during training, or per-layer gradient updates. To address these limitations, we propose LoQT, a method for efficiently training quantized models. LoQT uses gradient-based tensor factorization to initialize low-rank trainable weight matrices that are periodically merged into quantized full-rank weight matrices. Our approach is suitable for both pretraining and fine-tuning of models, which we demonstrate experimentally for language modeling and downstream task adaptation. We find that LoQT enables efficient training of models up to 7B parameters on a consumer-grade 24GB GPU. We also demonstrate the feasibility of training a 13B parameter model using per-layer gradient updates on the same hardware.

LoQT是一种用于高效训练量化模型的方法，它使用基于梯度的张量分解来初始化可训练的低秩权重矩阵，并周期性地合并到量化全秩权重矩阵中。我们发现LoQT使得在消费级24GB GPU上能够高效地训练高达7B参数的模型，并且还展示了在相同硬件上使用逐层梯度更新训练13B参数模型的可行性。

LoQT: 低秩适配模块用于量化训练