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@@ -1,25 +1,31 @@
# bitsandbytes
-bitsandbytes is a lightweight wrapper around CUDA custom functions, in particular 8-bit optimizers and quantization functions.
+Bitsandbytes is a lightweight wrapper around CUDA custom functions, in particular 8-bit optimizers and quantization functions.
+
+[Paper](https://arxiv.org/abs/2110.02861) -- [Video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IxrlHAJtqKE) -- [Docs](https://bitsandbytes.readthedocs.io/en/latest/)
+
+## TL;DR
+**Installation**:
+1. Note down version: ``conda list | grep cudatoolkit``
+2. Replace 111 with the version that you see: ``pip install bitsandbytes-cuda111``
+
+**Usage**:
+1. Comment out optimizer: ``#torch.optim.Adam(....)``
+2. Add 8-bit optimizer of your choice ``bnb.optim.Adam8bit(....)`` (arguments stay the same)
+3. Replace embedding layer if necessary: ``torch.nn.Embedding(..) -> bnb.nn.Embedding(..)``
+
## Features
-- 8-bit Optimizers: Adam, AdamW, RMSProp, LARS, LAMB
-- Percentile clipping: A gradient clipping technique that adjusts dynamically for each weight-tensor during training
+- 8-bit Optimizers: Adam, AdamW, RMSProp, LARS, LAMB (saves 75% memory)
- Stable Embedding Layer: Improved stability through better initialization, and normalization
-- Fast quantile estimation: Up to 100x faster than other algorithms
- 8-bit quantization: Quantile, Linear, and Dynamic quantization
-
-#### Details
-- **8-bit Optimizers** use an 8-bit instead of 32-bit state and thus save 75% of memory.
-- **Percentile Clipping** is an adaptive gradient clipping technique that adapts the clipping threshold automatically during training for each weight-tensor. It tracks a history of the past 100 gradient norms, and the gradient is clipped at a certain percentile p. For most tasks, p=5 works well and provides improved stability and, in some cases, even better performance (ResNet-50 ImageNet).
-- The **Stable Embedding Layer** uses a less variable initialization coupled with layer norm for stability. Usually, dense optimizers are used in conjunction with sparse BPE/word embeddings, and these dense optimizers perform incorrect updates, leading to instability. The Stable Embedding Layer fixes this problem by performing sparse updates by default for any chosen bnb optimizer.
-- Fast quantile estimation via **SRAM-Quantiles** algorithm, which is up to 100x faster than previous algorithms to estimate quantiles.
-- Various **8-bit Quantization** schemes which are useful to compress data. For example, gradient communication or Mixture of Experts token routing can be improved by using 8-bit quantization before communication followed by decompression to 16/32-bit.
+- Fast quantile estimation: Up to 100x faster than other algorithms
## Requirements & Installation
Requirements: anaconda, cudatoolkit, pytorch
Hardware requirements: NVIDIA Maxwell GPU or newer (>=GTX 9XX)
+Supported CUDA versions: 9.2 - 11.3
The requirements can best be fulfilled by installing pytorch via anaconda. You can install PyTorch by following the ["Get Started"](https://pytorch.org/get-started/locally/) instructions on the official website.
@@ -31,7 +37,7 @@ and take note of the Cuda version that you have installed. Then you can install
```bash
# choices: {cuda92, cuda 100, cuda101, cuda102, cuda110, cuda111, cuda113}
# replace XXX with the respective number
-pip install -i https://test.pypi.org/simple/ bitsandbytes-cudaXXX
+pip install bitsandbytes-cudaXXX
```
To check if your installation was successful, you can execute the following command, which runs a single bnb Adam update.
@@ -51,42 +57,20 @@ import bitsandbytes as bnb
adam = bnb.optim.Adam8bit(model.parameters(), lr=0.001, betas=(0.9, 0.995)) # add bnb optimizer
adam = bnb.optim.Adam(model.parameters(), lr=0.001, betas=(0.9, 0.995), optim_bits=8) # equivalent
-# use 32-bit Adam with 5th percentile clipping
-adam = bnb.optim.Adam(model.parameters(), lr=0.001, betas=(0.9, 0.995),
- optim_bits=32, percentile_clipping=5)
+
+torch.nn.Embedding(...) -> bnb.nn.StableEmbedding(...) # recommended for NLP models
```
-Note that by default all parameter tensors with less than 4096 elements are kept at 32-bit even if you initialize those parameters with 8-bit optimizers. This is done since such small tensors do not save much memory and often contain highly variable parameters (biases) or parameters that require high precision (batch norm, layer norm).
+Note that by default all parameter tensors with less than 4096 elements are kept at 32-bit even if you initialize those parameters with 8-bit optimizers. This is done since such small tensors do not save much memory and often contain highly variable parameters (biases) or parameters that require high precision (batch norm, layer norm). You can change this behavior like so:
+```
+# parameter tensors with less than 16384 values are optimized in 32-bit
+# it is recommended to use multiplies of 4096
+adam = bnb.optim.Adam8bit(model.parameters(), min_8bit_size=16384)
+```
### Change Bits and other Hyperparameters for Individual Parameters
-If you want to optimize some unstable parameters with 32-bit Adam and others with 8-bit Adam, with can use the `GlobalOptimManager`. With this, we can also configure specific parameters for sparse optimization, such as embedding layers. To do that, we need two things: (1) register the parameter while they are still on the CPU, (2) override the config with the new desired hyperparameters (anytime, anywhere).
-
-```python
-import torch
-import bitsandbytes as bnb
-
-mng = bnb.optim.GlobalOptimManager.get_instance()
-
-model = MyModel()
-mng.register_parameters(model.parameters()) # 1. register parameters while still on CPU
-
-model = model.cuda()
-# use 8-bit optimizer states for all parameters
-adam = bnb.optim.Adam(model.parameters(), lr=0.001, optim_bits=8)
-
-# 2a. override: the parameter model.fc1.weight now uses 32-bit Adam
-mng.override_config(model.fc1.weight, 'optim_bits', 32)
-
-# 2b. override: the two special layers use
-# sparse optimization + different learning rate + different Adam betas
-mng.override_config([model.special.weight, model.also_special.weight],
- key_value_dict ={'is_sparse': True, 'lr': 1e-5, 'betas'=(0.9, 0.98)})
-```
-
-### Stable Embedding Layer
-
-To use the stable embedding layer, simply replace the PyTorch embedding layer with `bnb.nn.StableEmbedding`. By default, this layer is sparsely optimized.
+If you want to optimize some unstable parameters with 32-bit Adam and others with 8-bit Adam, you can use the `GlobalOptimManager`. With this, we can also configure specific hyperparameters for particular layers, such as embedding layers. To do that, we need two things: (1) register the parameter while they are still on the CPU, (2) override the config with the new desired hyperparameters (anytime, anywhere). See our [guide](howto_config_override.md) for more details
### Fairseq Users
@@ -94,13 +78,27 @@ To use the Stable Embedding Layer, override the respective `build_embedding(...)
## Release and Feature History
-Last release: v0.0.22:
-- Fixed an error where a `reset_parameters()` call on the `StableEmbedding` would lead to an error in older PyTorch versions (from 1.7.0).
+For upcoming features and changes and full history see [Patch Notes](CHANGELOG.md).
+
+## Errors
-For upcoming features and changes and full history see [Patch Notes](PATCH_NOTES.md).
+1. RuntimeError: CUDA error: no kernel image is available for execution on the device. [Solution](errors_and_solutions.md#No-kernel-image-available)
## License
The majority of bitsandbytes is licensed under MIT, however portions of the project are available under separate license terms: Pytorch is licensed under the BSD license.
We thank Fabio Cannizzo for his work on [FastBinarySearch](https://github.com/fabiocannizzo/FastBinarySearch) which we use for CPU quantization.
+
+## Citation
+If you found this library and 8-bit optimizers or quantization routines useful, please consider citing out work.
+```
+@misc{dettmers2021optim8bit,
+ title={8-bit Optimizers via Block-wise Quantization},
+ author={Tim Dettmers and Mike Lewis and Sam Shleifer and Luke Zettlemoyer},
+ year={2021},
+ eprint={2110.02861},
+ archivePrefix={arXiv},
+ primaryClass={cs.LG}
+}
+```