MediSwift: Efficient Sparse Pre-trained Biomedical Language Models

Vithursan Thangarasa, Mahmoud Salem, Shreyas Saxena, Chen-Yu Leong, Joel Hestness, Sean Lie


Abstract
Large language models (LLMs) are typically trained on general source data forvarious domains, but a recent surge in domain-specific LLMs has shown theirpotential to outperform general-purpose models in domain-specific tasks (e.g.,biomedicine). Although domain-specific pre-training enhances efficiency andleads to smaller models, the computational costs of training these LLMs remainhigh, posing budgeting challenges. We introduce MediSwift, a suite of biomedicalLMs that leverage sparse pre-training on domain-specific biomedical text data.By inducing up to 75% weight sparsity during the pre-training phase, MediSwiftachieves a 2-2.5x reduction in training FLOPs. Notably, all sparse pre-trainingwas performed on the Cerebras CS-2 system, which is specifically designed torealize the acceleration benefits from unstructured weight sparsity, therebysignificantly enhancing the efficiency of the MediSwift models. Throughsubsequent dense fine-tuning and strategic soft prompting, MediSwift modelsoutperform existing LLMs up to 7B parameters on biomedical tasks, setting newbenchmarks w.r.t efficiency-accuracy on tasks such as PubMedQA. Our results showthat sparse pre-training, along with dense fine-tuning and soft prompting,offers an effective method for creating high-performing, computationallyefficient models in specialized domains.
Anthology ID:
2024.findings-acl.14
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics ACL 2024
Month:
August
Year:
2024
Address:
Bangkok, Thailand and virtual meeting
Editors:
Lun-Wei Ku, Andre Martins, Vivek Srikumar
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
214–230
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.findings-acl.14
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Vithursan Thangarasa, Mahmoud Salem, Shreyas Saxena, Chen-Yu Leong, Joel Hestness, and Sean Lie. 2024. MediSwift: Efficient Sparse Pre-trained Biomedical Language Models. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics ACL 2024, pages 214–230, Bangkok, Thailand and virtual meeting. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
MediSwift: Efficient Sparse Pre-trained Biomedical Language Models (Thangarasa et al., Findings 2024)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.findings-acl.14.pdf