Fast Inference of Mixture-of-Experts Language Models with Offloading
This addresses the problem of efficient inference for deep learning practitioners using MoE models on resource-constrained hardware, representing an incremental improvement over existing offloading methods.
The paper tackles the challenge of running large Mixture-of-Experts language models on consumer hardware with limited memory by proposing a novel offloading strategy that leverages MoE properties, enabling Mixtral-8x7B to run on desktop and free-tier Google Colab instances.
With the widespread adoption of Large Language Models (LLMs), many deep learning practitioners are looking for strategies of running these models more efficiently. One such strategy is to use sparse Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) - a type of model architectures where only a fraction of model layers are active for any given input. This property allows MoE-based language models to generate tokens faster than their dense counterparts, but it also increases model size due to having multiple experts. Unfortunately, this makes state-of-the-art MoE language models difficult to run without high-end GPUs. In this work, we study the problem of running large MoE language models on consumer hardware with limited accelerator memory. We build upon parameter offloading algorithms and propose a novel strategy that accelerates offloading by taking advantage of innate properties of MoE LLMs. Using this strategy, we build can run Mixtral-8x7B with mixed quantization on desktop hardware and free-tier Google Colab instances.