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Transfer learning on edge is challenging due to on-device limited resources. Existing work addresses this issue by training a subset of parameters or adding model patches. Developed with inference in mind, Inverted Residual Blocks (IRBs) split a convolutional layer into depthwise and pointwise convolutions, leading to more stacking layers, e.g., convolution, normalization, and activation layers. Though they are efficient for inference, IRBs require that additional activation maps are stored in memory for training weights for convolution layers and scales for normalization layers. As a result, their high memory cost prohibits training IRBs on resource-limited edge devices, and making them unsuitable in the context of transfer learning. To address this issue, we present MobileTL, a memory and computationally efficient on-device transfer learning method for models built with IRBs. MobileTL trains the shifts for internal normalization layers to avoid storing activation maps for the backward pass. Also, MobileTL approximates the backward computation of the activation layer (e.g., Hard-Swish and ReLU6) as a signed function which enables storing a binary mask instead of activation maps for the backward pass. MobileTL fine-tunes a few top blocks (close to output) rather than propagating the gradient through the whole network to reduce the computation cost. Our method reduces memory usage by 46% and 53% for MobileNetV2 and V3 IRBs, respectively. For MobileNetV3, we observe a 36% reduction in floating-point operations (FLOPs) when fine-tuning 5 blocks, while only incurring a 0.6% accuracy reduction on CIFAR10. Extensive experiments on multiple datasets demonstrate that our method is Pareto-optimal (best accuracy under given hardware constraints) compared to prior work in transfer learning for edge devices.
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This content will become publicly available on April 28, 2026
SLOPE: DOUBLE-PRUNED SPARSE PLUS LAZY LOW-RANK ADAPTER PRETRAINING OF LLMS
We propose SLOPE, a Double-Pruned Sparse Plus Lazy Low-rank Adapter Pretraining method for LLMs that improves the accuracy of sparse LLMs while accelerating their pretraining and inference and reducing their memory footprint. Sparse pretraining of LLMs reduces the accuracy of the model, to overcome this, prior work uses dense models during fine-tuning. SLOPE improves the accuracy of sparsely pretrained models by adding low-rank adapters in the final 1% iterations of pretraining without adding significant overheads to the model pretraining and inference. In addition, SLOPE uses a double-pruned backward pass formulation that prunes the transposed weight matrix using N:M sparsity structures to enable an accelerated sparse backward pass. SLOPE accelerates the training and inference of models with billions of parameters up to 1.25→ and 1.54→ respectively (OPT-33B and OPT-66B) while reducing their memory usage by up to 0.63→ and 0.61→ for training and inference respectively.
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- Award ID(s):
- 2340011
- PAR ID:
- 10591332
- Publisher / Repository:
- The Thirteenth International Conference on Learning Representations
- Date Published:
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Location:
- Singapore
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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