@@ -9,21 +9,26 @@ This guide provides a brief guide on how bitsandbytes supports storing quantized
## Quantized data storage
FSDP only supports sharding float data types which can be problematic because quantized weights are typically stored as integer data types (uint8). bitsandbytes doesn't have this problem because it uses `StoreChar` to read and write quantized weights regardless of the data type storage. This makes it simple to add a `quant_storage` parameter to the [`~nn.Linear4bit`] and [`~nn.Params4bit`] classes and set it to `torch.uint8` to maintain backward compatibility with the codebase.
FSDP only supports sharding float data types which can be problematic because quantized weights are typically stored as integer data types (uint8). bitsandbytes doesn't have this problem because it uses `StoreChar` to read and write quantized weights regardless of the data type storage. This makes it simple to add a `quant_storage` parameter to the [`~nn.Linear4bit`] and [`~nn.Params4bit`] classes and set it to `torch.uint8` to maintain backward compatibility with the codebase. With the `quant_storage` parameter, you can select any of the FSDP supported data types to shard [`~nn.Linear4bit`] with such as bfloat16, float16 or float32.
For example, you can configure this option in [`transformers.BitsAndBytesConfig`] by setting the `bnb_4bit_quant_storage` parameter.
With the `quant_storage` parameter, you can select any of the FSDP supported data types to shard [`~nn.Linear4bit`] with such as bfloat16, float16 or float32.