SlimFit: Memory-Efficient Fine-Tuning of Transformer-based Models Using
  Training Dynamics
Arash Ardakani Altan Haan Shangyin Tan Doru Thom Popovici Alvin Cheung Costin Iancu Koushik Sen
Transformer-based models, such as BERT and ViT, have achieved
state-of-the-art results across different natural language processing (NLP) and
computer vision (CV) tasks. However, these models are extremely memory
intensive during their fine-tuning process, making them difficult to deploy on
GPUs with limited memory resources. To address this issue, we introduce a new
tool called SlimFit that reduces the memory requirements of these models by
dynamically analyzing their training dynamics and freezing less-contributory
layers during fine-tuning. The layers to freeze are chosen using a runtime
inter-layer scheduling algorithm. SlimFit adopts quantization and pruning for
particular layers to balance the load of dynamic activations and to minimize
the memory footprint of static activations, where static activations refer to
those that cannot be discarded regardless of freezing. This allows SlimFit to
freeze up to 95% of layers and reduce the overall on-device GPU memory usage of
transformer-based models such as ViT and BERT by an average of 2.2x, across
different NLP and CV benchmarks/datasets such as GLUE, SQuAD 2.0, CIFAR-10,
CIFAR-100 and ImageNet with an average degradation of 0.2% in accuracy. For
such NLP and CV tasks, SlimFit can reduce up to 3.1x the total on-device memory
usage with an accuracy degradation of only up to 0.4%. As a result, while
fine-tuning of ViT on ImageNet and BERT on SQuAD 2.0 with a batch size of 128
requires 3 and 2 32GB GPUs respectively, SlimFit enables their fine-tuning on a
single 32GB GPU without any significant accuracy degradation.