Oral: Pipelined Backpropagation at Scale: Training Large Models without Batches

Apr 4, 2021

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New hardware can substantially increase the speed and efficiency of deep neural network training. To guide the development of future hardware architectures, it is pertinent to explore the hardware and machine learning properties of alternative training algorithms. In this work we evaluate the use of small batch, fine-grained Pipelined Backpropagation, an asynchronous pipeline parallel training algorithm that has significant hardware advantages. We introduce two methods, Spike Compensation and Linear Weight Prediction, that effectively mitigate the downsides caused by the asynchronicity of Pipelined Backpropagation and outperform existing techniques in our setting. We show that appropriate normalization and small batch sizes can also aid training. With our methods, fine-grained Pipelined Backpropagation using a batch size of one can match the accuracy of SGD for multiple networks trained on CIFAR-10 and ImageNet. Simple scaling rules allow the use of existing hyperparameters for traditional training without additional tuning.

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The Conference on Machine Learning and Systems targets research at the intersection of machine learning and systems. The conference aims to elicit new connections amongst these fields, including identifying best practices and design principles for learning systems, as well as developing novel learning methods and theory tailored to practical machine learning workflows.

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