QA-LoRA: Quantization-Aware Low-Rank Adaptation of Large Language Models
This addresses the problem of efficient LLM deployment for edge computing, though it is incremental as it builds on existing LoRA methods.
The paper tackles the computational burden of deploying large language models (LLMs) on edge devices by proposing QA-LoRA, a quantization-aware low-rank adaptation algorithm that quantizes weights during fine-tuning and integrates them without accuracy loss, achieving results with quantized models (e.g., INT4) validated on LLaMA and LLaMA2 families.
Recently years have witnessed a rapid development of large language models (LLMs). Despite the strong ability in many language-understanding tasks, the heavy computational burden largely restricts the application of LLMs especially when one needs to deploy them onto edge devices. In this paper, we propose a quantization-aware low-rank adaptation (QA-LoRA) algorithm. The motivation lies in the imbalanced degrees of freedom of quantization and adaptation, and the solution is to use group-wise operators which increase the degree of freedom of quantization meanwhile decreasing that of adaptation. QA-LoRA is easily implemented with a few lines of code, and it equips the original LoRA with two-fold abilities: (i) during fine-tuning, the LLM's weights are quantized (e.g., into INT4) to reduce time and memory usage; (ii) after fine-tuning, the LLM and auxiliary weights are naturally integrated into a quantized model without loss of accuracy. We apply QA-LoRA to the LLaMA and LLaMA2 model families and validate its effectiveness in different fine-tuning datasets and downstream scenarios. Code will be made available at https://github.com/yuhuixu1993/qa-lora.