Butterfly factorization for vision transformers on multi-IPU systems
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Recent advances in machine learning have led to increasingly large and complex models, placing significant demands on computation and memory. Techniques such as Butterfly factorization have emerged to reduce model parameters and memory footprints while preserving accuracy. Specialized hardware accelerators, such as Graphcore’s Intelligence Processing Units (IPUs), are designed to address these challenges through massive parallelism and efficient on-chip memory utilization. In this paper, we extend our analysis of Butterfly structures for efficient utilization on single and multiple IPUs, comparing their performance with GPUs. These structures drastically reduce the number of parameters and memory footprint while preserving model accuracy. Experimental results on the Graphcore GC200 IPU chip, compared with an NVIDIA A30 GPU, demonstrate a 98.5% compression ratio, with speedups of 1.6 × and 1.3 × for Butterfly and Pixelated Butterfly structures, respectively. Extending our evaluation to Vision Transformer (ViT) models, we compare Multi-GPU and Multi-IPU systems on the M2000 machine: Multi-GPU reaches a maximum accuracy of 84.51% with a training time of 401.44 min, whereas Multi-IPU attains a higher maximum accuracy of 88.92% with a training time of 694.03 min. These results demonstrate that Butterfly factorization enables substantial compression of ViT layers (up to 97.17%) while improving model accuracy. The findings highlight the promise of IPU machines as a suitable platform for large-scale machine learning model training, especially when coupled with sparsification methods like Butterfly factorization, thanks to their efficient support for model parallelism.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".