Adapters + LLama -- re-design. about speechbrain

[poonehmousavi]

I totally agree.. what we have done for LLama2 is the QLora(Qunatization+Lora) and only applicable for LLama2. I think with this trend of public LLM released so often, and all of them need Lora for fine-tuning, we need to have an unified class that could handle Lora(and Qlora) for different models. In HF, sft_trainer.py could handle this efficient fine-tuning. We also need to have an easy interface in SB for efficient fine-tuning. It should also work well with DDP.

[mravanelli]

I think it is very important too. We can support at least LoRA and adapters. I'm not sure what could be the best way to go to support it elegantly. One idea could be to implement a wrapper (e.g., Adapter) to apply to our models, which can plug the necessary new modules. However, it seems to me quite hard to create something easy to use and flexible at the same time. Any idea from the community?

[pplantinga]

I have used PEFT to apply Lora to an existing model and it was pretty straightforward to use. You just pass the model and it automatically replaces all relevant layers with Lora layers. We could do something similar

[pplantinga]

We could even import and use peft if the dependencies are light

[Adel-Moumen]

Hi @TParcollet, I agree with your strategy.

I have used PEFT to apply Lora to an existing model and it was pretty straightforward to use. You just pass the model and it automatically replaces all relevant layers with Lora layers. We could do something similar

I don't think that PEFT library is necessary since the theory/implementation is quite "easy" to reproduce. For instance, ESPNet has their own impl of LORA etc (https://github.com/espnet/espnet/blob/47de29c21f5a7db22089717e92add5e9604fcd48/espnet2/layers/create_adapter_fn.py#L224). We should follow the same strategy and provide our own adapters because many researchers may want to develop their own design/modify code etc which may be harder if we have speechbrain and peft.

Note: we could have our own implementation and also provide a PEFT compatible wrapper. But I don't know if this make sense/necessary.

[TParcollet]

Alright, I think that there are two problems here.

1. Building a wrapper that will naively replace Linear layers with LoRA / Houlsby and others is simple, I did it, and it's not that hard. However, this is only valid for basic research purposes, and making it slightly more evolved e.g. only specifying some linear layers etc, may be a bit harder.
2. Building something that is usable in practice, with quantisation, fast implementation etc may be MUCH more complicated. I mean, the literature on adapters for LLM is absurdly massive, and supporting this is impossible. Here, I'd say that supporting an extra lib could make sense, but it would need to be something very stable, and reliable AND that covers more than what we can do in 1. Otherwise, there is no point losing control over the code.

I am happy to do a PR for 1., but it will remain shallow IMHO.