Rezaul Karim


2025

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ECHO-LLaMA: Efficient Caching for High-Performance LLaMA Training
Maryam Dialameh | Rezaul Karim | Hossein Rajabzadeh | Omar Mohamed Awad | Boxing Chen | Hyock Ju Kwon | Walid Ahmed | Yang Liu
Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing: Industry Track

This paper introduces ECHO-LLaMA, an efficient LLaMA architecture designed to improve both the training speed and inference throughput of LLaMA architectures while maintaining its learning capacity. ECHO-LLaMA transforms LLaMA models into shared KV caching across certain layers, significantly reducing KV computational complexity while maintaining or improving language performance. Experimental results demonstrate that ECHO-LLaMA achieves up to 77% higher token-per-second throughput during training, up to 16% higher Model FLOPs Utilization (MFU), and up to 14% lower loss when trained on an equal number of tokens. Furthermore, on the 1.1B model, ECHO-LLaMA delivers approximately 7% higher test-time throughput compared to the baseline. By introducing a computationally efficient adaptation mechanism, ECHO-LLaMA offers a scalable and cost-effective solution for pretraining and finetuning large language models, enabling faster and more resource-efficient training without compromising performance.