xFormers is a modular library of optimized and experimental components for transformer training. It targets practical bottlenecks such as attention efficiency and GPU memory management, but complementary integrations remain experimental. section 5.1.2
Use xFormers when you need:
- Efficient attention and memory-management optimizations implemented directly in code. section 5.1.2
- Training-focused acceleration with quantization support, while checking whether accuracy changes for the workload. section 5.1.2
- A complementary option alongside DeepSpeed, Accelerate, or BitsandBytes, provided the combined setup works reliably. section 5.1.2
Table 5.1 Comparison of optimization packages for ML
|
Library
|
Faster training or inference
|
Code integration
|
Lower accuracy
|
Many GPUs
|
Quantization
|
Optimizations
|
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
|
DeepSpeed
|
Both
|
CLI
|
Depends
|
Yes
|
Supports
|
Caching, gradient checkpointing, memory management, scaling
|
|
Accelerate
|
Both
|
CLI and Code
|
Depends
|
Yes
|
Supports
|
Automation, compiling, parallelization
|
|
BitsandBytes
|
Both
|
Code
|
Always
|
NA
|
Yes but only
|
Quantization, quantized optimizers
|
|
xFormers
|
Training
|
Code
|
Depends
|
NA
|
Yes and more
|
Efficient attention, memory management
|
Compare xFormers with related optimization packages by integration style, training or inference support, quantization, and memory-oriented optimizations. section 5.1.2
