README.md

Implementing transformers

This is a learning repo where I will take notes on and implement LLM's from scratch, mainly for learning purposes. Essentially, it will collate notes, resources, and code implementations for learning about LLM's.

Code repo structure

• ./apps:
  • Examples using the package
• ./notes:
  • Unstructed markdown notes on various topics
• ./min_llm:
  • Contains the packaged code
• ./nbs:
  • Contains sandbox notebooks for learning concepts
• playground:
  • Contains sandbox code for learning concepts

Goal

Implement llama 3 in JAX and train a mini version of it. Implement all the fancy techniques discussed in the linked paper. Also make package of useful llm utilities like here.

Resources

Blog posts

• The Illustrated Transformer
• The Annotated Transformer
• Note 10: Self-Attention & Transformers from CS 224N
• Extra:
  • Transformer Inference Arithmetic

Papers

Chronologically ordered

• Generating Sequences With Recurrent Neural Networks
• Neural Machine Translation by Jointly Learning to Align and Translate
• Attention is All You Need
• BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding
• GPT-2: Language Models are Unsupervised Multitask Learners
• Language Models are Few-Shot Learners

More:

• An Introduction to Vision-Language Modeling
• Gemini paper

Books

• Build a Large Language Model (From Scratch) by Sebastian Raschka
• Speech and Language Processing by Dan Jurafsky and James H. Martin
• RLHF book

Posts

• Transformer Inference Arithmetic
• GPT in 60 Lines of NumPy
• Throughput is all you need

Other

• GPU MODE YouTube channel

Why?

Jax (eventually):

• Jax has better parallelization primitives which are useful for training large models
• Jax is lower-level and more similar to numpy, which forces you to dive deeper into the concepts
• Developing at a lower-level will make it easier to implement custom add-ons like speeding up inference with CUDA kernels or porting the inference module to C/Rust
• In the meantime, we will use some fancy PyTorch distributed stuff

Things to learn/implement

• Architectures:
  • GPT-2 (starter)
  • Llama (main goal)
  • VLM
  • Pixtral/multimodal VLM
  • Efficient VLA for robotics
  • Mixture of experts
  • SSM's. Start with langauge and then move to speech.
  • Implement mini versions of architectures like Gemini, Mixtral
• MLSys:
  • CUDA kernels
  • Triton kernels
  • Thunderkitten kernels
  • Quantization
  • pybind to integrate custom-written kernels into a PyTorch framework
  • Model and data parallelism across GPU's: tensor parallelism, column parallelism, pipeline parallelism, data parallelism (fully-sharded data parallelism)
• General learning:
  • Optimizing for both memory-bound and compute-bound operations
  • Understanding GPU memory hierarchy and computation capabilities
  • Efficient attention algorithms

Installation and usage

Some parts of this repo implement a package that you can download and use. The motivation is inspired by Meta's Lingua.

$ pip install git+https://github.com/rosikand/min-llm.git

Usage:

import min_llm