Training Transformers Together
Not on the map. Why?
Abstract (arXiv)
The infrastructure necessary for training state-of-the-art models is becoming overly expensive, which makes training such models affordable only to large corporations and institutions. Recent work proposes several methods for training such models collaboratively, i.e., by pooling together hardware from many independent parties and training a shared model over the Internet. In this demonstration, we collaboratively trained a text-to-image transformer similar to OpenAI DALL-E. We invited the viewers to join the ongoing training run, showing them instructions on how to contribute using the available hardware. We explained how to address the engineering challenges associated with such a training run (slow communication, limited memory, uneven performance between devices, and security concerns) and discussed how the viewers can set up collaborative training runs themselves. Finally, we show that the resulting model generates images of reasonable quality on a number of prompts.
Key facts. Cited by 5 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026). Builds on 36 of its 51 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 7 Jul 2022.
Builds on
36 of 51 references.
References · 36
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24 more
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Built on by
Citing papers per year: 2023: 2; 2024: 0; 2025: 2; 2026: 1.
5 papers.
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- 2025TAH-QUANT: Effective Activation Quantization in Pipeline Parallelism over Slow Network2 Jun 2025
- 2025Incentivizing Permissionless Distributed Learning of LLMs27 May 2025
- 2023Towards Open Federated Learning Platforms: Survey and Vision from Technical and Legal Perspectives5 Jul 2023
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