Hardware-Aware Compression with Random Operation Access Specific Tile (ROAST) Hashing

Advancements in deep learning are often associated with increasing model sizes. Training and deploying large models require sophisticated hardware and incur significantly higher costs. Thus, model compression is a widely explored approach to solving the problem. However, SOTA techniques fall short in one or more desirable aspects of compression - for instance, pruning does not reduce memory for training, quantization can only provide up to 32$\times$ compression, HashedNet is cache-inefficient, etc. This paper proposes a model-agnostic, cache-friendly, and hardware-aware model compression approach: Random Operation Access Specific Tile (ROAST) hashing. ROAST collapses the parameters by clubbing them through a lightweight mapping. While clubbing these parameters, ROAST utilizes cache hierarchies by aligning the memory access pattern with the parameter access pattern. ROAST is up to ${\sim}25\times$ faster to train and ${\sim}50\times$ faster to infer than the popular parameter sharing method HashedNet. Additionally, ROAST introduces global weight sharing, which is empirically and theoretically superior to local weight sharing in HashedNet, and can be of independent interest. With ROAST, we can efficiently train and deploy the model using a much smaller memory footprint ($\sim 10 - 100\times$ lesser) in text and image classification tasks. ROAST-MM kernel implementation is open-source (https://github.com/apd10/RzLinear/tree/stable)