Accurate LoRA-Finetuning Quantization of LLMs via Information Retention

Haotong Qin, Xudong Ma, Xingyu Zheng, Xiaoyang Li, Yang Zhang, Shouda Liu, Jie Luo, Xianglong Liu, Michele Magno
Proceedings of the 41st International Conference on Machine Learning, PMLR 235:41498-41516, 2024.

Abstract

The LoRA-finetuning quantization of LLMs has been extensively studied to obtain accurate yet compact LLMs for deployment on resource-constrained hardware. However, existing methods cause the quantized LLM to severely degrade and even fail to benefit from the finetuning of LoRA. This paper proposes a novel IR-QLoRA for pushing quantized LLMs with LoRA to be highly accurate through information retention. The proposed IR-QLoRA mainly relies on two technologies derived from the perspective of unified information: (1) statistics-based Information Calibration Quantization allows the quantized parameters of LLM to retain original information accurately; (2) finetuning-based Information Elastic Connection makes LoRA utilizes elastic representation transformation with diverse information. Comprehensive experiments show that IR-QLoRA can significantly improve accuracy across LLaMA and LLaMA2 families under 2-4 bit-widths, e.g., 4-bit LLaMA-7B achieves 1.4% improvement on MMLU compared with the state-of-the-art methods. The significant performance gain requires only a tiny 0.31% additional time consumption, revealing the satisfactory efficiency of our IR-QLoRA. We highlight that IR-QLoRA enjoys excellent versatility, compatible with various frameworks (e.g., NormalFloat and Integer quantization) and brings general accuracy gains. The code is available at https://github.com/htqin/ir-qlora .

Cite this Paper

BibTeX
@InProceedings{pmlr-v235-qin24b, title = {Accurate {L}o{RA}-Finetuning Quantization of {LLM}s via Information Retention}, author = {Qin, Haotong and Ma, Xudong and Zheng, Xingyu and Li, Xiaoyang and Zhang, Yang and Liu, Shouda and Luo, Jie and Liu, Xianglong and Magno, Michele}, booktitle = {Proceedings of the 41st International Conference on Machine Learning}, pages = {41498--41516}, year = {2024}, editor = {Salakhutdinov, Ruslan and Kolter, Zico and Heller, Katherine and Weller, Adrian and Oliver, Nuria and Scarlett, Jonathan and Berkenkamp, Felix}, volume = {235}, series = {Proceedings of Machine Learning Research}, month = {21--27 Jul}, publisher = {PMLR}, pdf = {https://raw.githubusercontent.com/mlresearch/v235/main/assets/qin24b/qin24b.pdf}, url = {https://proceedings.mlr.press/v235/qin24b.html}, abstract = {The LoRA-finetuning quantization of LLMs has been extensively studied to obtain accurate yet compact LLMs for deployment on resource-constrained hardware. However, existing methods cause the quantized LLM to severely degrade and even fail to benefit from the finetuning of LoRA. This paper proposes a novel IR-QLoRA for pushing quantized LLMs with LoRA to be highly accurate through information retention. The proposed IR-QLoRA mainly relies on two technologies derived from the perspective of unified information: (1) statistics-based Information Calibration Quantization allows the quantized parameters of LLM to retain original information accurately; (2) finetuning-based Information Elastic Connection makes LoRA utilizes elastic representation transformation with diverse information. Comprehensive experiments show that IR-QLoRA can significantly improve accuracy across LLaMA and LLaMA2 families under 2-4 bit-widths, e.g., 4-bit LLaMA-7B achieves 1.4% improvement on MMLU compared with the state-of-the-art methods. The significant performance gain requires only a tiny 0.31% additional time consumption, revealing the satisfactory efficiency of our IR-QLoRA. We highlight that IR-QLoRA enjoys excellent versatility, compatible with various frameworks (e.g., NormalFloat and Integer quantization) and brings general accuracy gains. The code is available at https://github.com/htqin/ir-qlora .} }
Endnote
%0 Conference Paper %T Accurate LoRA-Finetuning Quantization of LLMs via Information Retention %A Haotong Qin %A Xudong Ma %A Xingyu Zheng %A Xiaoyang Li %A Yang Zhang %A Shouda Liu %A Jie Luo %A Xianglong Liu %A Michele Magno %B Proceedings of the 41st International Conference on Machine Learning %C Proceedings of Machine Learning Research %D 2024 %E Ruslan Salakhutdinov %E Zico Kolter %E Katherine Heller %E Adrian Weller %E Nuria Oliver %E Jonathan Scarlett %E Felix Berkenkamp %F pmlr-v235-qin24b %I PMLR %P 41498--41516 %U https://proceedings.mlr.press/v235/qin24b.html %V 235 %X The LoRA-finetuning quantization of LLMs has been extensively studied to obtain accurate yet compact LLMs for deployment on resource-constrained hardware. However, existing methods cause the quantized LLM to severely degrade and even fail to benefit from the finetuning of LoRA. This paper proposes a novel IR-QLoRA for pushing quantized LLMs with LoRA to be highly accurate through information retention. The proposed IR-QLoRA mainly relies on two technologies derived from the perspective of unified information: (1) statistics-based Information Calibration Quantization allows the quantized parameters of LLM to retain original information accurately; (2) finetuning-based Information Elastic Connection makes LoRA utilizes elastic representation transformation with diverse information. Comprehensive experiments show that IR-QLoRA can significantly improve accuracy across LLaMA and LLaMA2 families under 2-4 bit-widths, e.g., 4-bit LLaMA-7B achieves 1.4% improvement on MMLU compared with the state-of-the-art methods. The significant performance gain requires only a tiny 0.31% additional time consumption, revealing the satisfactory efficiency of our IR-QLoRA. We highlight that IR-QLoRA enjoys excellent versatility, compatible with various frameworks (e.g., NormalFloat and Integer quantization) and brings general accuracy gains. The code is available at https://github.com/htqin/ir-qlora .
APA
Qin, H., Ma, X., Zheng, X., Li, X., Zhang, Y., Liu, S., Luo, J., Liu, X. & Magno, M.. (2024). Accurate LoRA-Finetuning Quantization of LLMs via Information Retention. Proceedings of the 41st International Conference on Machine Learning, in Proceedings of Machine Learning Research 235:41498-41516 Available from https://proceedings.mlr.press/v235/qin24b.html.

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