# On Efficient Training of Large-Scale Deep Learning Models: A Literature Review

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2304.03589 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.03589/

## Key facts

- Cited by 26 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 218 of its 299 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 7 Apr 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 218)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [Very Deep Convolutional Networks for Large-Scale Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.1556/) (2014)
- [Exploring the Limits of Transfer Learning with a Unified Text-to-Text Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.10683/) (2019)
- [LLaMA: Open and Efficient Foundation Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.13971/) (2023)
- [RoBERTa: A Robustly Optimized BERT Pretraining Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.11692/) (2019)
- [Swin Transformer: Hierarchical Vision Transformer using Shifted Windows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14030/) (2021)
- [A Simple Framework for Contrastive Learning of Visual Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.05709/) (2020)
- [ImageNet Large Scale Visual Recognition Challenge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.0575/) (2014)
- [Masked Autoencoders Are Scalable Vision Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.06377/) (2021)
- [Batch Normalization: Accelerating Deep Network Training by Reducing Internal Covariate Shift](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1502.03167/) (2015)
- [Scaling Laws for Neural Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.08361/) (2020)
- [Rethinking the Inception Architecture for Computer Vision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.00567/) (2015)
- [PaLM: Scaling Language Modeling with Pathways](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.02311/) (2022)
- [mixup: Beyond Empirical Risk Minimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.09412/) (2017)
- [SGDR: Stochastic Gradient Descent with Warm Restarts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.03983/) (2016)
- [Fully Convolutional Networks for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.4038/) (2014)
- [You Only Look Once: Unified, Real-Time Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.02640/) (2015)
- [Training data-efficient image transformers & distillation through attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.12877/) (2020)
- [Zero-Shot Text-to-Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.12092/) (2021)
- [Going Deeper with Convolutions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.4842/) (2014)
- [On the Opportunities and Risks of Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.07258/) (2021)
- [FlashAttention: Fast and Memory-Efficient Exact Attention with IO-Awareness](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.14135/) (2022)
- [Gaussian Error Linear Units (GELUs)](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.08415/) (2016)
- [Switch Transformers: Scaling to Trillion Parameter Models with Simple and Efficient Sparsity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.03961/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 26 of 26)

- [Temporal Data Meets LLM -- Explainable Financial Time Series Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.11025/) (2023)
- [No Train No Gain: Revisiting Efficient Training Algorithms For Transformer-based Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.06440/) (2023)
- [LGViT: Dynamic Early Exiting for Accelerating Vision Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.00255/) (2023)
- [The Efficiency Spectrum of Large Language Models: An Algorithmic Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.00678/) (2023)
- [Healthcare Copilot: Eliciting the Power of General LLMs for Medical Consultation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.13408/) (2024)
- [Decentralized SGD and Average-direction SAM are Asymptotically Equivalent](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.02913/) (2023)
- [Applications of Large Scale Foundation Models for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.12144/) (2023)
- [Sampling from Bayesian Neural Network Posteriors with Symmetric Minibatch Splitting Langevin Dynamics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.19780/) (2024)
- [Slamming: Training a Speech Language Model on One GPU in a Day](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.15814/) (2025)
- [Revisiting Token Dropping Strategy in Efficient BERT Pretraining](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.15273/) (2023)
- [ZenFlow: Enabling Stall-Free Offloading for LLM Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.12242/) (2025)
- [Unlikelihood Tuning on Negative Samples Amazingly Improves Zero-Shot Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.16599/) (2023)
- [Zero-Shot Sharpness-Aware Quantization for Pre-trained Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.13315/) (2023)
- [A General and Efficient Training for Transformer via Token Expansion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.00672/) (2024)
- [Modular Growth of Hierarchical Networks: Efficient, General, and Robust Curriculum Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.06262/) (2024)
- [Frontiers of Deep Learning: From Novel Application to Real-World Deployment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.14386/) (2024)
- [UME: Upcycling Mixture-of-Experts for Scalable and Efficient Automatic Speech Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.17507/) (2024)
- [Stepsize anything: A unified learning rate schedule for budgeted-iteration training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.24452/) (2025)
- [MaskPro: Linear-Space Probabilistic Learning for Strict (N:M)-Sparsity on LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.12876/) (2025)
- [Reducing the Need for Backpropagation and Discovering Better Optima With Explicit Optimizations of Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.07498/) (2023)
- [Explicit Foundation Model Optimization with Self-Attentive Feed-Forward Neural Units](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.07510/) (2023)
- [Testing the Segment Anything Model on radiology data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.12880/) (2023)
- [Advancing Neural Network Performance through Emergence-Promoting Initialization Scheme](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.19044/) (2024)
- [Data-Efficient Training by Evolved Sampling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.23461/) (2025)
- [Wave-GMS: Lightweight Multi-Scale Generative Model for Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.03216/) (2025)
- [Recursive Block-Diagonal Coupling for Resource-Efficient Training of Vision Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.23656/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The field of deep learning has witnessed significant progress, particularly in computer vision (CV), natural language processing (NLP), and speech. The use of large-scale models trained on vast amounts of data holds immense promise for practical applications, enhancing industrial productivity and facilitating social development. With the increasing demands on computational capacity, though numerous studies have explored the efficient training, a comprehensive summarization on acceleration techniques of training deep learning models is still much anticipated. In this survey, we present a detailed review for training acceleration. We consider the fundamental update formulation and split its basic components into five main perspectives: (1) data-centric: including dataset regularization, data sampling, and data-centric curriculum learning techniques, which can significantly reduce the computational complexity of the data samples; (2) model-centric, including acceleration of basic modules, compression training, model initialization and model-centric curriculum learning techniques, which focus on accelerating the training via reducing the calculations on parameters; (3) optimization-centric, including the selection of learning rate, the employment of large batchsize, the designs of efficient objectives, and model average techniques, which pay attention to the training policy and improving the generality for the large-scale models; (4) budgeted training, including some distinctive acceleration methods on source-constrained situations; (5) system-centric, including some efficient open-source distributed libraries/systems which provide adequate hardware support for the implementation of acceleration algorithms. By presenting this comprehensive taxonomy, our survey presents a comprehensive review to understand the general mechanisms within each component and their joint interaction.
