The Fine-Grained Complexity of Gradient Computation for Training Large Language Models

Abstract

Large language models (LLMs) have made fundamental contributions over the last a few years. To train an LLM, one needs to alternatingly run `forward' computations and backward computations. The forward computation can be viewed as attention function evaluation, and the backward computation can be viewed as a gradient computation. In previous work by [Alman and Song, NeurIPS 2023], it was proved that the forward step can be performed in almost-linear time in certain parameter regimes, but that there is no truly sub-quadratic time algorithm in the remaining parameter regimes unless the popular hypothesis $\mathsf{SETH}$ is false. In this work, we show nearly identical results for the harder-seeming problem of computing the gradient of loss function of one layer attention network, and thus for the entire process of LLM training. This completely characterizes the fine-grained complexity of every step of LLM training.