Large foundation models have demonstrated a great ability to achieve general
human-level intelligence far beyond traditional approaches. As the technique
keeps attracting attention from the AI community, more and more large
foundation models have become publically available. However, most of those
models exhibit a major deficiency in specialized-task applications, where the
step of finetuning is still required for obtaining satisfactory performance. As
the number of available models and specialized tasks keeps growing, the job of
general finetuning becomes highly nontrivial. In this paper, we take the first
step to address this issue. We introduce an extensible and lightweight toolkit,
LMFlow, which aims to simplify the finetuning and inference of general large
foundation models. LMFlow offers a complete finetuning workflow for a large
foundation model to support personalized training with limited computing
resources. Furthermore, it supports continuous pretraining, instruction tuning,
parameter-efficient finetuning, alignment tuning, and large model inference,
along with carefully designed and extensible APIs. This toolkit has been
thoroughly tested and is available at this https URL

本文介绍了一个工具包 LMFlow，其目的是简化大型基础模型的微调和推理，并支持个性化训练和连续预训练以及大模型推理。

LMFlow: 大型基础模型的微调和推理的可扩展工具包

LMFlow: An Extensible Toolkit for Finetuning and Inference of Large  Foundation Models

In conventional distributed learning over a network, multiple agents
collaboratively build a common machine learning model. However, due to the
underlying non-i.i.d. data distribution among agents, the unified learning
model becomes inefficient for each agent to process its locally accessible
data. To address this problem, we propose a graph-attention-based personalized
training algorithm (GATTA) for distributed deep learning. The GATTA enables
each agent to train its local personalized model while exploiting its
correlation with neighboring nodes and utilizing their useful information for
aggregation. In particular, the personalized model in each agent is composed of
a global part and a node-specific part. By treating each agent as one node in a
graph and the node-specific parameters as its features, the benefits of the
graph attention mechanism can be inherited. Namely, instead of aggregation
based on averaging, it learns the specific weights for different neighboring
nodes without requiring prior knowledge about the graph structure or the
neighboring nodes' data distribution. Furthermore, relying on the
weight-learning procedure, we develop a communication-efficient GATTA by
skipping the transmission of information with small aggregation weights.
Additionally, we theoretically analyze the convergence properties of GATTA for
non-convex loss functions. Numerical results validate the excellent
performances of the proposed algorithms in terms of convergence and
communication cost.

本文提出了一种基于图注意力机制的分布式深度学习个性化训练算法（GATTA），通过将每个代理视为图中的一个节点并利用其与邻居节点的相关性，学习它们的有用信息以汇聚成本地个性化模型，从而提高分布式学习的效率、收敛速度并降低通信成本。