Patrick Yubeaton

Patrick Yubeaton, Jianqiao Cambridge Mo, Karthik Garimella et al. · cambridge

Private inference (PI) serves an important role in guaranteeing the privacy of user data when interfacing with proprietary machine learning models such as LLMs. However, PI remains practically intractable due to the massive latency costs associated with nonlinear functions present in LLMs. Existing works have focused on improving latency of specific LLM nonlinearities (such as the Softmax, or the GeLU) via approximations. However, new types of nonlinearities are regularly introduced with new LLM architectures, and this has led to a constant game of catch-up where PI researchers attempt to optimize the newest nonlinear function. We introduce TruncFormer, a framework for taking any LLM and transforming it into a plaintext emulation of PI. Our framework leverages the fact that nonlinearities in LLMs are differentiable and can be accurately approximated with a sequence of additions, multiplications, and truncations. Further, we decouple the add/multiply and truncation operations, and statically determine where truncations should be inserted based on a given field size and input representation size. This leads to latency improvements over existing cryptographic protocols that enforce truncation after every multiplication operation. We open source our code for community use.

Patrick Yubeaton, Sarthak Gupta, M. Salman Asif et al.

The design of novel algorithms for solving inverse problems in signal processing is an incredibly difficult, heuristic-driven, and time-consuming task. In this short paper, we the idea of automated algorithm discovery in the signal processing context through meta-learning tools such as Neural Architecture Search (NAS). Specifically, we examine the Iterative Shrinkage Thresholding Algorithm (ISTA) and its accelerated Fast ISTA (FISTA) variant as candidates for algorithm rediscovery. We develop a meta-learning framework which is capable of rediscovering (several key elements of) the two aforementioned algorithms when given a search space of over 50,000 variables. We then show how our framework can apply to various data distributions and algorithms besides ISTA/FISTA.

Patrick Yubeaton, Tareq Mahmoud, Shehab Naga et al.

As they become more capable, large language models (LLMs) have continued to rapidly increase in size. This has exacerbated the difficulty in running state of the art LLMs on small, edge devices. Standard techniques advocate solving this problem through lossy compression techniques such as quantization or pruning. However, such compression techniques are lossy, and have been shown to change model behavior in unpredictable manners. We propose Huff-LLM, an \emph{end-to-end, lossless} model compression method that lets users store LLM weights in compressed format \emph{everywhere} -- cloud, disk, main memory, and even in on-chip memory/buffers. This allows us to not only load larger models in main memory, but also reduces bandwidth required to load weights on chip, and makes more efficient use of on-chip weight buffers. In addition to the memory savings achieved via compression, we also show latency and energy efficiency improvements when performing inference with the compressed model.