flash-attention VS alpaca_lora_4bit

1) Pretty much, it's mathematically equivalent. The only software issues are things like managing dependency versions and data formats in-memory, but Flash Attention 2 is already built into HuggingFace and other popular libraries. Flash Attention 3 probably will be soon, although it requires an H100 GPU to run

2) Flash Attention 2 added support for GQA in past version updates:

https://github.com/Dao-AILab/flash-attention

3) They're comparing this implementation of Flash Attention (which is written in raw CUDA C++) to the Triton implementation of a similar algorithm (which is written in Triton): https://triton-lang.org/main/getting-started/tutorials/06-fu...

If you're looking for an implementation, I highly recommend checking out fast attention [https://github.com/Dao-AILab/flash-attention]. It's my go-to, and far better than anything we could whip up here using just PyTorch or TensorFlow.

* Even if I bought a 3090, I would have to get a computer to go with it, along with a PSU and some cooling. Don't know where to start with that.

[1] https://github.com/Dao-AILab/flash-attention/issues/190

highly recommend using Tri's implementation https://github.com/Dao-AILab/flash-attention rotary should be built in, and some group overseas even contributed alibi

Doesn't seem so https://github.com/Dao-AILab/flash-attention/issues/542 No updates for a while.

I wonder how this compares to Flash Attention (https://github.com/HazyResearch/flash-attention), which is the other "memory aware" Attention project I'm aware of.

I guess Flash Attention is more about utilizing memory GPU SRam correctly, where this is more about using the OS/CPU memory better?

https://github.com/HazyResearch/flash-attention

After a very quick read, that's my understanding too: It's just KNN search. So I agree on points 1-3. When something works well, I don't care much about point 4.

I've had only mixed success with KNN search. Maybe I haven't done it right? Nothing seems to work quite as well for me as explicit token-token interactions by some form of attention, which as we all know is too costly for long sequences (O(n²)). Lately I've been playing with https://github.com/hazyresearch/safari , which uses a lot less compute and seems promising. Otherwise, for long sequences I've yet to find something better than https://github.com/HazyResearch/flash-attention for n×n interactions and https://github.com/glassroom/heinsen_routing for n×m interactions. If anyone here has other suggestions, I'd love to hear about them.

Longer sequence length in transformers is an active area of research (see e.g the great work from the Flash-attention team - https://github.com/HazyResearch/flash-attention), and I'm sure will improve things dramatically very soon.

For training there is also https://github.com/johnsmith0031/alpaca_lora_4bit

I've been trying to fine tune an erotica model on some large context chat history (reverse proxy logs) and a literotica-instruct dataset I made, with a max context of 8k. The large context size eats a lot of VRAM so I've been trying to find the most efficient way to experiment considering I'd like to do multiple runs to test some ideas. So I'm going to try and use https://github.com/johnsmith0031/alpaca_lora_4bit, which is supposed to train faster and use less memory than qlora.

Follow up the popular work of u/tloen alpaca-lora, I wrapped the setup of alpaca_lora_4bit to add support for GPTQ training in form of installable pip packages. You can perform training and inference with multiple quantizations method to compare the results.

" Using LoRAs with GPTQ-for-LLaMa This requires using a monkey patch that is supported by this web UI: https://github.com/johnsmith0031/alpaca_lora_4bit"

4-bit GPTQ LoRA training was available since early April. I did not see any comparison to it in the QLoRA paper or even a mention, so it makes me think they were not aware it already existed.

https://github.com/johnsmith0031/alpaca_lora_4bit is still the SOTA - Faster than qlora, trains on a GPTQ base.

I would also like to know how one would finetune this in 4 bit? I think one could take the merged 8K PEFT with the LLaMA weights, and then quantize it to 4 bit, and then train with https://github.com/johnsmith0031/alpaca_lora_4bit ?

I was under the impression that you just git clone this repo into text-generation-webui/repositories (so you would have GPTQ_for_Llama and alpaca_lora_4bit in the folder), and then just load with monkey patch. Is that not correct? I also tried just downloading alpaca_lora_4bit on its own, git cloning text-gen-webui within it, and installing requirements.txt for both and running with monkey patch. I was following the sections of alpaca_lora_4bit, "Text Generation Webui Monkey Patch" and "monkey patch inside webui"

I dont have any familiarity with esxi, but I can say that there are quite a few posts about people doing it on proxmox. I've currently got a machine with 2x3090 passing through to VM's. When I'm training, I pass them both through to the same VM and can do lora 4-bit training on llama33 using https://github.com/johnsmith0031/alpaca_lora_4bit. Then, at inference time, I run a single card into a different VM, and have an extra card available for experimentation.