torchao: PyTorch Architecture Optimization

Introduction | Inference | Training | Dtypes | Composability | Installation | Community Contributions | How to contribute

Introduction

torchao is a library to create and integrate high-performance custom data types, layouts and kernels into your PyTorch workflows with up to 2x speedups with 65% less VRAM for inference and support for training

All with no intrusive code changes and minimal accuracy degradation.

Benchmarks

Inference

Without intrusive code changes

Quantizing your models is a 1 liner that should work on any model with an nn.Linear including your favorite HuggingFace model. You can find a more comprehensive usage instructions here and a HuggingFace inference example here

from torchao.quantization.quant_api import quantize, int4_weight_only
m = quantize(m, int4_weight_only())

Benchmarks are run on a machine with a single A100 GPU using the script in _models/llama which generates text in a latency-optimized way (batchsize=1)

The models used were meta-llama/Llama-2-7b-chat-hf and meta-llama/Meta-Llama-3-8B.

Model	Technique	wikitext-perplexity	Tokens/Second	Memory Bandwidth (GB/s)	Peak Memory (GB)	Model Size (GB)
Llama-2-7B	Base (bfloat16)	12.212	105.14	1389.35	13.88	13.21
	int8dq	12.262	9.20	60.93	8.33	6.62
	int8wo	12.204	150.18	994.40	8.95	6.62
	int4wo-64	12.843	199.86	746.66	4.50	3.74
	int4wo-64-GPTQ	12.489	199.86	746.66	4.50	3.74
	autoquant	12.204	159.22	1069.87	8.91	6.72
Llama-3-8B	Base (bfloat16)	N/A	94.97	1425.55	16.43	15.01
	int8dq	N/A	8.44	63.45	8.98	7.52
	int8wo	N/A	139.76	1051.02	10.42	7.52
	int4wo-64	N/A	179.44	757.60	6.62	4.22
	autoquant	N/A	137.71	1037.74	11.08	7.54

note: Int8 dynamic quantization works best on compute bound as opposed to memory bound models. Some relatable examples might be SAM which is compute bound vs Llama at batchsize=1 which is memory bound.

For int4 we make heavy use of tinygemm of torch.ops.aten._weight_int4pack_mm to bitpack into a layout optimized for tensor cores

And a quick crash course on inference quantization to help parse the above table. Int4 quantization is an ambiguous term because there's the dtype in which a layer is represented and then the dtype in which the computation is done. For example, if you're using Weight-Only (wo) int4 quantization that means that the layer will be upcasted to a larger dtype like fp16 so an int4 matrix multiplication is defined as F.linear(input, weight.to(input.dtype)). Dynamic quantization (DQ) primarily targets activations, enabling on-the-fly quantization from higher precision formats like bf16 to lower precision formats such as int8. This process, when supported by hardware, allows for direct computation, such as performing F.linear(input, weight). Naive quantization algorithms are also notoriously sensitive to outliers so we also typically set a group size that applies a scale factor per group of 64 elements in the case of int4wo64.

With intrusive code changes

In some cases we rewrote popular GenAI models to be significantly faster in native PyTorch as in no C++/CUDA to achieve at the time SOTA inference performance. These involve more intrusive code changes.

• 8x speedups for Image segmentation models with sam-fast
• 10x speedups for Language models with gpt-fast
• 3x speedup for Diffusion models with sd-fast

Training

We've added support for semi-structured 2:4 sparsity with 6% end to end speedups on ViT-L

The code change is a 1 liner with the full example available here

swap_linear_with_semi_sparse_linear(model, {"seq.0": SemiSparseLinear})

Newer dtypes

• MX implementing training and inference support with tensors using the OCP MX spec data types, which can be described as groupwise scaled float8/float6/float4/int8, with the scales being constrained to powers of two. This work is prototype as the hardware support is not available yet.
• nf4 which was used to implement QLoRA one of the most popular finetuning algorithms without writing custom Triton or CUDA code. Accessible talk here
• fp6 for 2x faster inference over fp16 with an easy to use API quantize(model, fp6_llm_weight_only())

Composability

A key design principle for us is composability as in any new dtype or layout we provide needs to work with torch.compile() and needs to work with FSDP. It shouldn't matter if the kernels are written in pure PyTorch, CUDA, C++, or Triton - things should just work! And here is our current strategy

1. Write the dtype, layout or bit packing logic in pure PyTorch and code-generate efficient kernels with torch.compile. You can inspect those kernels with TORCH_LOGS="output_code" python your_code.py and check if a single kernel is being generated and if any unnecessary buffers are being created
2. However once you get a kernel, how do you know how good it is? The best way is to benchmark the compiler generated code with the best kernel on the market. But packaging custom CPP/CUDA kernels that work on multiple devices is tedious but we've abstracted all the tedium from you with our custom ops support so if you love writing kernels but hate packaging, we'd love to accept contributions for your custom ops. One key benefit is a kernel written as a custom op will just work with no graph breaks with torch.compile(). Compilers are great at optimizations like fusions and overhead reduction but it's challenging for compilers to rewrite the math of an algorithm such that it's faster but also numerically stable so we are betting on both compilers and custom ops
3. Finally while historically most quantization has been done for inference, there is now a thriving area of research combining distributed algorithms and quantization. One popular example is NF4 which was used to implement the QLoRA algorithm. The NF4 tensor also contains semantics for how it should be sharded over multiple devices so it composes with FSDP. We gave an accessible talk on how to do this.

Installation

torchao makes liberal use of several new features in Pytorch, it's recommended to use it with the current nightly or latest stable version of PyTorch.

Stable Release

pip install torchao --extra-index-url https://download.pytorch.org/whl/test/cu121 # full options are cpu/cu118/cu121/cu124

Nightly Release

pip install --pre torchao-nightly --index-url https://download.pytorch.org/whl/nightly/cu121 # full options are cpu/cu118/cu121/cu124

From source

git clone https://github.com/pytorch/ao
cd ao
python setup.py install

Community Contributions

• jeromeku has implemented
  • GaLore a drop for the Adam Optimizer that allows you to finetune llama 7b on a single 4090 card with up to 70% speedups relative to eager PyTorch
  • DoRA a newer replacement for QLoRA with more promising convergence characteristics
  • Fused int4/fp16 Quant Matmul which is particularly useful for compute bound kernels showing 4x speedups over tinygemm for larger batch sizes such as 512
• gau-nernst fp6 kernels that are 4x faster than fp16 torchao/prototype/quant_llm
• vayuda with generic bitpacking kernels that were code generated using pure PyTorch prototype/common
• andreaskopf and melvinebenezer with 1 bit LLMs Bitnet 1.58 bitpacked into uint2 and fully code-generated with torch.compile

How to contribute

This repository is currently under heavy development

• If you have suggestions on the API or use cases you'd like to be covered, please open an issue
• If you'd like to co-develop the library with us please join us on #torchao on discord.gg/cudamode - there are a lot of dtypes out there and we could use a lot more hands to make them go brrr

If you're contributing a feature to ao

pip install -r dev-requirements.txt
python setup.py develop

For most developers you probably want to skip building custom C++/CUDA extensions for faster iteration

USE_CPP=0 python setup.py install

License

torchao is released under the BSD 3 license.