The field of large language models is moving towards accelerating training and inference times, with a focus on innovative techniques such as sparsity, parallelization, and adaptive rank allocation. Researchers are exploring hardware-accelerated approaches, including FPGA-based accelerators and SmartNICs, to improve performance and reduce latency. Additionally, novel architectural optimization techniques, such as FFN Fusion, are being developed to reduce sequential computation and improve inference efficiency. Noteworthy papers include:
- Accelerating Transformer Inference and Training with 2:4 Activation Sparsity, which demonstrates the potential for sparsity to play a key role in accelerating large language model training and inference.
- FFN Fusion: Rethinking Sequential Computation in Large Language Models, which introduces an architectural optimization technique that reduces sequential computation in large language models by identifying and exploiting natural opportunities for parallelization.