Enhancing Training Efficiency Using Packing with Flash Attention
<|reference_start|>Enhancing Training Efficiency Using Packing with Flash Attention: Padding is often used in tuning LLM models by adding special tokens to shorter training examples to match the length of the longest sequence in each batch. While this ensures uniformity for batch processing, it introduces inefficiencies by including irrelevant padding tokens in the computation and wastes GPU resources. Hugging Face SFT trainer has always offered the option to use packing to combine multiple training examples, allowing for maximal utilization of GPU resources. However, up till now, it did not offer proper masking of each packed training example. This capability has been added to Hugging Face Transformers 4.44. We analyse this new feature and show the benefits across different variations of packing.<|reference_end|>
@article{kundu2024enhancing,
    title={Enhancing Training Efficiency Using Packing with Flash Attention},
    author={Achintya Kundu, Rhui Dih Lee, Laura Wynter, Raghu Kiran Ganti, Mayank
  Mishra},
    journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2407.09105},
    year={2024},
    archivePrefix={arXiv},
    eprint={2407.09105},
    primaryClass={cs.LG cs.AI}
}