LoRa but with multiple resets in a row
In 2021, Hu et al. proposed low-rank adapters (LoRa) for LLMs. This method significantly reduces the cost of fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) by only training a few added parameters (low-rank networks) while keeping the LLM’s original parameters (high-rank networks) frozen.
With LoRa, we still need an existing pre-trained model to fine-tune, i.e., it can’t pre-train a good LLM from scratch due to the low-rank restrictions. It leaves pre-training unaffordable for most individuals and organizations.
To reduce this cost, Lialin et al. (2023) propose ReLoRa. This is a modification of LoRa that allows pre-training LLMs from scratch.
In this article, I first explain how ReLoRa works. Then, I analyze and comment on the results presented in the scientific paper describing ReLoRa. In the last section, I show how to set up and run ReLoRa on your computer.
Note about the licenses: The scientific paper published on arXiv and describing ReLoRa is distributed under a CC BY 4.0 license. The source code of ReLoRa is published on GitHub and distributed under an Apache 2.0 license allowing commercial use.
To understand how ReLoRa works, we must first have a closer look at LoRa.
LoRA works by adding two different sets of new trainable parameters, A and B, which are merged back after training into the original frozen high-rank network of the pre-trained model.
It may seem obvious but it is important to understand that the rank of the sum of A and B is higher than the sum of their individual ranks. This can be formalized as followed:
LoRa only trained these two sets of parameters. However, if we could reset, train, and merge them back to the original high-rank network multiple times in a row we would be able to increase over time the total rank of the network. In other words, we would obtain a larger model.
Why LoRa does not perform these resets?
Because there are several significant obstacles to overcome to make these resets useful…