Distributed machine learning is primarily motivated by the promise of increased computation power for accelerating training and mitigating privacy concerns. Unlike machine learning on a single device, distributed machine learning requires collaboration and communication among the devices. This creates several new challenges: (1) the heavy communication overhead can be a bottleneck that slows down the training, and (2) the unreliable communication and weaker control over the remote entities make the distributed system vulnerable to systematic failures and malicious attacks. This paper presents a variant of stochastic gradient descent (SGD) with improved communication efficiency and security in distributed environments. Our contributions include (1) a new technique called error reset to adapt both infrequent synchronization and message compression for communication reduction in both synchronous and asynchronous training, (2) new score-based approaches for validating the updates, and (3) integration with both error reset and score-based validation. The proposed system provides communication reduction, both synchronous and asynchronous training, Byzantine tolerance, and local privacy preservation. We evaluate our techniques both theoretically and empirically.
more »
« less
Hoplite: efficient and fault-tolerant collective communication for task-based distributed systems
Task-based distributed frameworks (e.g., Ray, Dask, Hydro) have become increasingly popular for distributed applications that contain asynchronous and dynamic workloads, including asynchronous gradient descent, reinforcement learning, and model serving. As more data-intensive applications move to run on top of task-based systems, collective communication efficiency has become an important problem. Unfortunately, traditional collective communication libraries (e.g., MPI, Horovod, NCCL) are an ill fit, because they require the communication schedule to be known before runtime and they do not provide fault tolerance.
We design and implement Hoplite, an efficient and fault-tolerant collective communication layer for task-based distributed systems. Our key technique is to compute data transfer schedules on the fly and execute the schedules efficiently through fine-grained pipelining. At the same time, when a task fails, the data transfer schedule adapts quickly to allow other tasks to keep making progress. We apply Hoplite to a popular task-based distributed framework, Ray. We show that Hoplite speeds up asynchronous stochastic gradient descent, reinforcement learning, and serving an ensemble of machine learning models that are difficult to execute efficiently with traditional collective communication by up to 7.8x, 3.9x, and 3.3x, respectively.
more »
« less
- Award ID(s):
- 1730628
- PAR ID:
- 10310448
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- SIGCOMM'21: Proceedings of the 2021 ACM SIGCOMM 2021 Conference
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
More Like this
-
-
Coded distributed computation has become common practice for performing gradient descent on large datasets to mitigate stragglers and other faults. This paper proposes a novel algorithm that encodes the partial derivatives themselves and furthermore optimizes the codes by performing lossy compression on the derivative codewords by maximizing the information contained in the codewords while minimizing the information between the codewords. The utility of this application of coding theory is a geometrical consequence of the observed fact in optimization research that noise is tolerable, sometimes even helpful, in gradient descent based learning algorithms since it helps avoid overfitting and local minima. This stands in contrast with much current conventional work on distributed coded computation which focuses on recovering all of the data from the workers. A second further contribution is that the low-weight nature of the coding scheme allows for asynchronous gradient updates since the code can be iteratively decoded; i.e., a worker’s task can immediately be updated into the larger gradient. The directional derivative is always a linear function of the direction vectors; thus, our framework is robust since it can apply linear coding techniques to general machine learning frameworks such as deep neural networks.more » « less
-
Many applications that use large-scale machine learning (ML) increasingly prefer different models for subgroups (e.g., countries) to improve accuracy, fairness, or other desiderata. We call this emerging popular practice learning over groups , analogizing to GROUP BY in SQL, albeit for ML training instead of SQL aggregates. From the systems standpoint, this practice compounds the already data-intensive workload of ML model selection (e.g., hyperparameter tuning). Often, thousands of models may need to be trained, necessitating high-throughput parallel execution. Alas, most ML systems today focus on training one model at a time or at best, parallelizing hyperparameter tuning. This status quo leads to resource wastage, low throughput, and high runtimes. In this work, we take the first step towards enabling and optimizing learning over groups from the data systems standpoint for three popular classes of ML: linear models, neural networks, and gradient-boosted decision trees. Analytically and empirically, we compare standard approaches to execute this workload today: task-parallelism and data-parallelism. We find neither is universally dominant. We put forth a novel hybrid approach we call grouped learning that avoids redundancy in communications and I/O using a novel form of parallel gradient descent we call Gradient Accumulation Parallelism (GAP). We prototype our ideas into a system we call Kingpin built on top of existing ML tools and the flexible massively-parallel runtime Ray. An extensive empirical evaluation on large ML benchmark datasets shows that Kingpin matches or is 4x to 14x faster than state-of-the-art ML systems, including Ray's native execution and PyTorch DDP.more » « less
-
Significant theoretical work has established that in specific regimes, neural networks trained by gradient descent behave like kernel methods. However, in practice, it is known that neural networks strongly outperform their associated kernels. In this work, we explain this gap by demonstrating that there is a large class of functions which cannot be efficiently learned by kernel methods but can be easily learned with gradient descent on a two layer neural network outside the kernel regime by learning representations that are relevant to the target task. We also demonstrate that these representations allow for efficient transfer learning, which is impossible in the kernel regime. Specifically, we consider the problem of learning polynomials which depend on only a few relevant directions, i.e. of the form $f(x)=g(Ux)$ where $U: \R^d \to \R^r$ with $d≫r$. When the degree of f⋆ is p, it is known that n≍dp samples are necessary to learn f⋆ in the kernel regime. Our primary result is that gradient descent learns a representation of the data which depends only on the directions relevant to f. This results in an improved sample complexity of n≍d2r+drp. Furthermore, in a transfer learning setup where the data distributions in the source and target domain share the same representation U but have different polynomial heads we show that a popular heuristic for transfer learning has a target sample complexity independent of d.more » « less
-
Camps-Valls, Gustau ; Ruiz, Francisco J. ; Valera, Isabel (Ed.)Linear contextual bandit is a popular online learning problem. It has been mostly studied in centralized learning settings. With the surging demand of large-scale decentralized model learning, e.g., federated learning, how to retain regret minimization while reducing communication cost becomes an open challenge. In this paper, we study linear contextual bandit in a federated learning setting. We propose a general framework with asynchronous model update and communication for a collection of homogeneous clients and heterogeneous clients, respectively. Rigorous theoretical analysis is provided about the regret and communication cost under this distributed learning framework; and extensive empirical evaluations demonstrate the effectiveness of our solution.more » « less
- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
-
Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Conference Paper:
- https://doi.org/10.1145/3452296.3472897
