GQA: Training Generalized Multi-Query Transformer Models from Multi-Head Checkpoints

Joshua Ainslie, James Lee-Thorp, Michiel de Jong, Yury Zemlyanskiy, Federico Lebron, Sumit Sanghai


Abstract
Multi-query attention (MQA), which only uses a single key-value head, drastically speeds up decoder inference. However, MQA can lead to quality degradation, and moreover it may not be desirable to train a separate model just for faster inference. We (1) propose a recipe for uptraining existing multi-head language model checkpoints into models with MQA using 5% of original pre-training compute, and (2) introduce grouped-query attention (GQA), a generalization of multi-query attention which uses an intermediate (more than one, less than number of query heads) number of key-value heads. We show that uptrained GQA achieves quality close to multi-head attention with comparable speed to MQA.
Anthology ID:
2023.emnlp-main.298
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Month:
December
Year:
2023
Address:
Singapore
Editors:
Houda Bouamor, Juan Pino, Kalika Bali
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
4895–4901
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.emnlp-main.298
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.emnlp-main.298
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Joshua Ainslie, James Lee-Thorp, Michiel de Jong, Yury Zemlyanskiy, Federico Lebron, and Sumit Sanghai. 2023. GQA: Training Generalized Multi-Query Transformer Models from Multi-Head Checkpoints. In Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 4895–4901, Singapore. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
GQA: Training Generalized Multi-Query Transformer Models from Multi-Head Checkpoints (Ainslie et al., EMNLP 2023)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.emnlp-main.298.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2023.emnlp-main.298.mp4