Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive performance on a range of Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks. Unfortunately, the immense amount of computations and memory accesses required for LLM training makes them prohibitively expensive in terms of hardware cost, and thus challenging to deploy in use cases such as on-device learning. In this paper, motivated by the observation that LLM training is memory-bound, we propose a novel dynamic quantization strategy, termed Dynamic Stashing Quantization (DSQ), that puts a special focus on reducing the memory operations, but also enjoys the other benefits of low precision training, such as the reduced arithmetic cost. We conduct a thorough study on two translation tasks (trained-from-scratch) and three classification tasks (fine-tuning). DSQ reduces the amount of arithmetic operations by 20.95× and the number of DRAM operations by 2.55× on IWSLT17 compared to the standard 16-bit fixed-point, which is widely used in on-device learning.

Current literature demonstrates that Large Language Models (LLMs) are great few-shot learners, and prompting significantly increases their performance on a range of downstream tasks in a few-shot learning setting. An attempt to automate human-led prompting followed, with some progress achieved. In particular, subsequent work demonstrates that automation can outperform fine-tuning in certain K-shot learning scenarios. In this paper, we revisit techniques for automated prompting on six different downstream tasks and a larger range of K-shot learning settings. We find that automated prompting does not consistently outperform simple manual prompting. Our work suggests that, in addition to fine-tuning, manual prompting should be used as a baseline in this line of research.

The inference of Large language models (LLMs) requires immense computation and memory resources. To curtail these costs, quantisation has emerged as a promising solution, but existing LLM quantisation mainly focuses on 8-bit. In this work, we explore the statistical and learning properties of the LLM layer and attribute the bottleneck of LLM quantisation to numerical scaling offsets. To address this, we adapt block quantisations for LLMs, a family of methods that share scaling factors across packed numbers. Block quantisations efficiently reduce the numerical scaling offsets solely from an arithmetic perspective, without additional treatments in the computational path. Our nearly-lossless quantised 6-bit LLMs achieve a 19× higher arithmetic density and 5× memory density than the float32 baseline, surpassing the prior art 8-bit quantisation by 2.5× in arithmetic density and 1.2× in memory density, without requiring any data calibration or re-training. We also share our insights into sub-8-bit LLM quantisation, including the mismatch between activation and weight distributions, optimal fine-tuning strategies, and a lower quantisation granularity inherent in the statistical properties of LLMs. The latter two tricks enable nearly-lossless 4-bit LLMs on downstream tasks. Our code is open-sourced.