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1. Accordion: Adaptive Gradient Communication via Critical Learning Regime Identification

   Agarwal, S. ; Wang, H. ; Lee, K. ; Venkataraman, S. ; Papailiopoulos, D. ( April 2021 , Fourth Conference on Machine Learning and Systems)

   null (Ed.)

   Distributed model training suffers from communication bottlenecks due to frequent model updates transmitted across compute nodes. To alleviate these bottlenecks, practitioners use gradient compression techniques like sparsification, quantization, or low-rank updates. The techniques usually require choosing a static compression ratio, often requiring users to balance the trade-off between model accuracy and per-iteration speedup. In this work, we show that such performance degradation due to choosing a high compression ratio is not fundamental. An adaptive compression strategy can reduce communication while maintaining final test accuracy. Inspired by recent findings on critical learning regimes, in which small gradient errors can have irrecoverable impact on model performance, we propose Accordion a simple yet effective adaptive compression algorithm. While Accordion maintains a high enough compression rate on average, it avoids over-compressing gradients whenever in critical learning regimes, detected by a simple gradient-norm based criterion. Our extensive experimental study over a number of machine learning tasks in distributed environments indicates that Accordion, maintains similar model accuracy to uncompressed training, yet achieves up to 5.5x better compression and up to 4.1x end-to-end speedup over static approaches. We show that Accordion also works for adjusting the batch size, another popular strategy for alleviating communication bottlenecks. 

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2. DLion: Decentralized Distributed Deep Learning in Micro-Clouds

   https://doi.org/10.1145/3431379.3460643  

   Hong, Rankyung ; Chandra, Abhishek ( June 2020 , HPDC '21)

   null (Ed.)

   Deep learning (DL) is a popular technique for building models from large quantities of data such as pictures, videos, messages generated from edges devices at rapid pace all over the world. It is often infeasible to migrate large quantities of data from the edges to centralized data center(s) over WANs for training due to privacy, cost, and performance reasons. At the same time, training large DL models on edge devices is infeasible due to their limited resources. An attractive alternative for DL training distributed data is to use micro-clouds---small-scale clouds deployed near edge devices in multiple locations. However, micro-clouds present the challenges of both computation and network resource heterogeneity as well as dynamism. In this paper, we introduce DLion, a new and generic decentralized distributed DL system designed to address the key challenges in micro-cloud environments, in order to reduce overall training time and improve model accuracy. We present three key techniques in DLion: (1) Weighted dynamic batching to maximize data parallelism for dealing with heterogeneous and dynamic compute capacity, (2) Per-link prioritized gradient exchange to reduce communication overhead for model updates based on available network capacity, and (3) Direct knowledge transfer to improve model accuracy by merging the best performing model parameters. We build a prototype of DLion on top of TensorFlow and show that DLion achieves up to 4.2X speedup in an Amazon GPU cluster, and up to 2X speed up and 26% higher model accuracy in a CPU cluster over four state-of-the-art distributed DL systems. 

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3. Adaptive Quantization of Model Updates for Communication-Efficient Federated Learning

   https://doi.org/10.1109/ICASSP39728.2021.9413697  

   Jhunjhunwala, Divyansh ; Gadhikar, Advait ; Joshi, Gauri ; Eldar, Yonina C. ( June 2021 , IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP))

   Communication of model updates between client nodes and the central aggregating server is a major bottleneck in federated learning, especially in bandwidth-limited settings and high-dimensional models. Gradient quantization is an effective way of reducing the number of bits required to communicate each model update, albeit at the cost of having a higher error floor due to the higher variance of the stochastic gradients. In this work, we propose an adaptive quantization strategy called AdaQuantFL that aims to achieve communication efficiency as well as a low error floor by changing the number of quantization levels during the course of training. Experiments on training deep neural networks show that our method can converge in much fewer communicated bits as compared to fixed quantization level setups, with little or no impact on training and test accuracy. 

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4. On the Convergence of Communication-Efficient Local SGD for Federated Learning

   Hongchang Gao, An Xu ( February 2021 , 35th AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI 2021))

   Federated Learning (FL) has attracted increasing attention in recent years. A leading training algorithm in FL is local SGD, which updates the model parameter on each worker and averages model parameters across different workers only once in a while. Although it has fewer communication rounds than the classical parallel SGD, local SGD still has large communication overhead in each communication round for large machine learning models, such as deep neural networks. To address this issue, we propose a new communicationefficient distributed SGD method, which can significantly reduce the communication cost by the error-compensated double compression mechanism. Under the non-convex setting, our theoretical results show that our approach has better communication complexity than existing methods and enjoys the same linear speedup regarding the number of workers as the full-precision local SGD. Moreover, we propose a communication-efficient distributed SGD with momentum, which also has better communication complexity than existing methods and enjoys a linear speedup with respect to the number of workers. At last, extensive experiments are conducted to verify the performance of our proposed methods. 

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5. Adaptive Communication Strategies to Achieve the Best Error-Runtime Trade-off in Local-update SGD

   Wang, Jianyu ; Joshi, Gauri ( April 2019 , Systems and Machine Learning (SysML) Conference)

   Large-scale machine learning training, in particular, distributed stochastic gradient descent, needs to be robust to inherent system variability such as node straggling and random communication delays. This work considers a distributed training framework where each worker node is allowed to perform local model updates and the resulting models are averaged periodically. We analyze the true speed of error convergence with respect to wall-clock time (instead of the number of iterations) and analyze how it is affected by the frequency of averaging. The main contribution is the design of ADACOMM, an adaptive communication strategy that starts with infrequent averaging to save communication delay and improve convergence speed, and then increases the communication frequency in order to achieve a low error floor. Rigorous experiments on training deep neural networks show that ADACOMM can take 3x less time than fully synchronous SGD and still reach the same final training loss. 

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