{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/tempo-accelerating-transformer-based-model","title":"Tempo: Accelerating Transformer-Based Model Training through Memory Footprint Reduction","arxiv_id":"2210.10246","date":"2022-10-19","proceeding":null,"authors":["Muralidhar Andoorveedu","Zhanda Zhu","Bojian Zheng","Gennady Pekhimenko"],"abstract":"Training deep learning models can be computationally expensive. Prior works have shown that increasing the batch size can potentially lead to better overall throughput. However, the batch size is frequently limited by the accelerator memory capacity due to the activations/feature maps stored for the training backward pass, as larger batch sizes require larger feature maps to be stored. Transformer-based models, which have recently seen a surge in popularity due to their good performance and applicability to a variety of tasks, have a similar problem. To remedy this issue, we propose Tempo, a new approach to efficiently use accelerator (e.g., GPU) memory resources for training Transformer-based models. Our approach provides drop-in replacements for the GELU, LayerNorm, and Attention layers, reducing the memory usage and ultimately leading to more efficient training. We implement Tempo and evaluate the throughput, memory usage, and accuracy/loss on the BERT Large pre-training task. We demonstrate that Tempo enables up to 2x higher batch sizes and 16% higher training throughput over the state-of-the-art baseline. We also evaluate Tempo on GPT2 and RoBERTa models, showing 19% and 26% speedup over the baseline.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2210.10246v2","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2210.10246v2.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"tempo-accelerating-transformer-based-model","repo_url":"https://github.com/uoft-ecosystem/tempo","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"pytorch","reach":{"status":"ok"}}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":null,"task_name":"GPU"}],"methods":[{"method_slug":"adam","method_name":"Adam"},{"method_slug":"attention","method_name":"Attention"},{"method_slug":"attention-dropout","method_name":"Attention Dropout"},{"method_slug":"bert","method_name":"BERT"},{"method_slug":"dense-connections","method_name":"Dense Connections"},{"method_slug":"dropout","method_name":"Dropout"},{"method_slug":"layer-normalization","method_name":"Layer Normalization"},{"method_slug":"linear-layer","method_name":"Linear Layer"},{"method_slug":"linear-warmup-with-linear-decay","method_name":"Linear Warmup With Linear Decay"},{"method_slug":"multi-head-attention","method_name":"Multi-Head Attention"},{"method_slug":"residual-connection","method_name":"Residual Connection"},{"method_slug":"roberta","method_name":"RoBERTa"},{"method_slug":"softmax","method_name":"Softmax"},{"method_slug":"weight-decay","method_name":"Weight Decay"},{"method_slug":"wordpiece","method_name":"WordPiece"}],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":"https://app.syntology.ai/?focus=2210.10246","mcp":{"get_harvested_code_for_paper":{"arxiv_id":"2210.10246"}},"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers","read_at":"2026-09-24T18:15:14+00:00","read_at_is":"when the build read Syntology's graph, not when any sample ran","claim":"Per-sample execution status on synthesized fixtures; not a correctness claim about the paper. Samples come from repositories linked to the paper, official or community; repo_kind says which.","repos":[{"provenance":"deterministic:regex_extraction","url":"https://github.com/UofT-EcoSystem/Tempo","reach":{"status":"ok"}},{"provenance":"external:paperswithcode_snapshot_2025-07-28","url":"https://github.com/uoft-ecosystem/tempo","reach":{"status":"ok"}}],"summary":{"ran_draft_wrong":1,"unverified":1},"by_repo_kind":{"official":{"samples":1,"ran":0,"repositories":1}},"repo_kind_vocabulary":{"official":"The archive marks this repository official for the paper","named_in_paper":"The archive records that the paper mentions this repository; it is not marked official","listed":"In the archive's code links for this paper, not marked official and not recorded as mentioned in the paper","found_in_text":"Syntology found this repository in the paper's own text; whether it is the authors' implementation is not asserted","community":"Not in the archive's code links for this paper; a community repository Syntology harvested"},"n_pointer_only_for_licence":2,"samples":[{"code_sha256_prefix":"0f786c407fb1ee4c","entry":"swish","repo":null,"repo_kind":null,"path":null,"file_url":null,"link_basis":"identical_code_first_harvested_elsewhere","language":"python","status":"ran_draft_wrong","verification_level":2,"contract_check":"MISDECLARED","metamorphic_tier":"invariant","behaviour_fingerprint":true,"licence":null,"inline_ok":false,"mcp_get_code":{"code_sha256":"0f786c407fb1ee4c"}},{"code_sha256_prefix":"b3aa7f0f06a96951","entry":"load_tf_weights_in_bert","repo":"uoft-ecosystem/tempo","repo_kind":"official","path":"NVIDIA_DeepLearningExample_BERT/modeling_tempo.py","file_url":"https://github.com/uoft-ecosystem/tempo/blob/HEAD/NVIDIA_DeepLearningExample_BERT/modeling_tempo.py","link_basis":"first_harvest_node","language":"python","status":"unverified","verification_level":0,"contract_check":null,"metamorphic_tier":null,"behaviour_fingerprint":false,"licence":"NONE","inline_ok":false,"mcp_get_code":{"code_sha256":"b3aa7f0f06a96951"}}]},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}