LLMs as On-demand Customizable Service

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable language understanding and generation capabilities. However, training, deploying, and accessing these models pose notable challenges, including resource-intensive demands, extended training durations, and scalability issues. To address these issues, we introduce a concept of hierarchical, distributed LLM architecture that aims at enhancing the accessibility and deployability of LLMs across heterogeneous computing platforms, including general-purpose computers (e.g., laptops) and IoT-style devices (e.g., embedded systems). By introducing a "layered" approach, the proposed architecture enables on-demand accessibility to LLMs as a customizable service. This approach also ensures optimal trade-offs between the available computational resources and the user's application needs. We envision that the concept of hierarchical LLM will empower extensive, crowd-sourced user bases to harness the capabilities of LLMs, thereby fostering advancements in AI technology in general.

Exploring Challenges of Deploying BERT-based NLP Models in Resource-Constrained Embedded Devices

BERT-based neural architectures have established themselves as popular state-of-the-art baselines for many downstream NLP tasks. However, these architectures are data-hungry and consume a lot of memory and energy, often hindering their deployment in many real-time, resource-constrained applications. Existing lighter versions of BERT (eg. DistilBERT and TinyBERT) often cannot perform well on complex NLP tasks. More importantly, from a designer's perspective, it is unclear what is the "right" BERT-based architecture to use for a given NLP task that can strike the optimal trade-off between the resources available and the minimum accuracy desired by the end user. System engineers have to spend a lot of time conducting trial-and-error experiments to find a suitable answer to this question. This paper presents an exploratory study of BERT-based models under different resource constraints and accuracy budgets to derive empirical observations about this resource/accuracy trade-offs. Our findings can help designers to make informed choices among alternative BERT-based architectures for embedded systems, thus saving significant development time and effort.