Just One Byte (per gradient): A Note on Low-Bandwidth Decentralized
  Language Model Finetuning Using Shared Randomness
Eric Zelikman Qian Huang Percy Liang Nick Haber Noah D. Goodman
Language model training in distributed settings is limited by the
communication cost of gradient exchanges. In this short note, we extend recent
work from Malladi et al. (2023), using shared randomness to perform distributed
fine-tuning with low bandwidth. The method is a natural decentralized extension
of memory-efficient Simultaneous Perturbation Stochastic Approximation (SPSA).
Each iteration, each machine seeds a Random Number Generator (RNG) to perform
local reproducible perturbations on model weights and calculate and exchange
scalar projected gradients, which are then used to update each model. By using
a (machine, sample) identifier as the random seed, each model can regenerate
one another's perturbations. As machines only exchange single-byte projected
gradients, this is highly communication efficient. There are also potential
privacy benefits, as projected gradients may be calculated on different
training data, and models never access the other's data. Our approach not only
drastically reduces communication bandwidth requirements but also accommodates
dynamic addition or removal of machines during the training process and retains
the memory-efficient and inference-only advantages of recent work. We perform
proof-of-concept experiments to demonstrate the potential usefulness of this
method, building off of rich literature on distributed optimization and
memory-efficient training.