Towards Low-Bit Communication for Tensor Parallel LLM Inference

This paper was accepted at the Efficient Natural Language and Speech Processing (ENLSP) Workshop at NeurIPS 2024.
Tensor parallelism provides an effective way to increase server large language model (LLM) inference efficiency despite adding an additional communication cost. However, as server LLMs continue to scale in size, they will need to be distributed across more devices, magnifying the communication cost. One way to approach this problem is with quantization, but current methods for LLMs tend to avoid quantizing the features that tensor parallelism needs to communicate. Taking advantage…Apple Machine Learning Research