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Population Based Training (PBT) is a recent approach that jointly optimizes neural network weights and hyperparameters which periodically copies weights of the best performers and mutates hyperparameters during training. Previous PBT implementations have been synchronized glass-box systems. We propose a general, black-box PBT framework that distributes many asynchronous trials (a small number of training steps with warm-starting) across a cluster, coordinated by the PBT controller. The black-box design does not make assumptions on model architectures, loss functions or training procedures. Our system supports dynamic hyperparameter schedules to optimize both differentiable and non-differentiable metrics. We apply our system to train a state-of-the-art WaveNet generative model for human voice synthesis. We show that our PBT system achieves better accuracy, less sensitivity and faster convergence compared to existing methods, given the same computational resource.
This paper has two contributions. First, we propose a novel coded matrix multiplication technique called Generalized PolyDot codes that advances on existing methods for coded matrix multiplication under storage and communication constraints. This technique uses garbage alignment, i.e., aligning computations in coded computing that are not a part of the desired output. Generalized PolyDot codes bridge between Polynomial codes and MatDot codes, trading off between recovery threshold and communication costs. Second, we demonstrate that Generalized PolyDot can be used for training large Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) on unreliable nodes prone to soft-errors. This requires us to address three additional challenges: (i) prohibitively large overhead of coding the weight matrices in each layer of the DNN at each iteration; (ii) nonlinear operations during training, which are incompatible with linear coding; and (iii) not assuming presence of an error-free master node, requiring us to architect a fully decentralized implementation without any single point of failure. We allow all primary DNN training steps, namely, matrix multiplication, nonlinear activation, Hadamard product, and update steps as well as the encoding/decoding to be error-prone. We consider the case of mini-batch size $B=1$, as well as $B>1$, leveraging coded matrix-vector products, and matrix-matrix products respectively. The problem of DNN training under soft-errors also motivates an interesting, probabilistic error model under which a real number $(P,Q)$ MDS code is shown to correct $P-Q-1$ errors with probability $1$ as compared to $lfloor frac{P-Q}{2} rfloor$ for the more conventional, adversarial error model. We also demonstrate that our proposed strategy can provide unbounded gains in error tolerance over a competing replication strategy and a preliminary MDS-code-based strategy for both these error models.
In the last five years, edge computing has attracted tremendous attention from industry and academia due to its promise to reduce latency, save bandwidth, improve availability, and protect data privacy to keep data secure. At the same time, we have witnessed the proliferation of AI algorithms and models which accelerate the successful deployment of intelligence mainly in cloud services. These two trends, combined together, have created a new horizon: Edge Intelligence (EI). The development of EI requires much attention from both the computer systems research community and the AI community to meet these demands. However, existing computing techniques used in the cloud are not applicable to edge computing directly due to the diversity of computing sources and the distribution of data sources. We envision that there missing a framework that can be rapidly deployed on edge and enable edge AI capabilities. To address this challenge, in this paper we first present the definition and a systematic review of EI. Then, we introduce an Open Framework for Edge Intelligence (OpenEI), which is a lightweight software platform to equip edges with intelligent processing and data sharing capability. We analyze four fundamental EI techniques which are used to build OpenEI and identify several open problems based on potential research directions. Finally, four typical application scenarios enabled by OpenEI are presented.
This paper investigates a population-based training regime based on game-theoretic principles called Policy-Spaced Response Oracles (PSRO). PSRO is general in the sense that it (1) encompasses well-known algorithms such as fictitious play and double oracle as special cases, and (2) in principle applies to general-sum, many-player games. Despite this, prior studies of PSRO have been focused on two-player zero-sum games, a regime wherein Nash equilibria are tractably computable. In moving from two-player zero-sum games to more general settings, computation of Nash equilibria quickly becomes infeasible. Here, we extend the theoretical underpinnings of PSRO by considering an alternative solution concept, $alpha$-Rank, which is unique (thus faces no equilibrium selection issues, unlike Nash) and applies readily to general-sum, many-player settings. We establish convergence guarantees in several games classes, and identify links between Nash equilibria and $alpha$-Rank. We demonstrate the competitive performance of $alpha$-Rank-based PSRO against an exact Nash solver-based PSRO in 2-player Kuhn and Leduc Poker. We then go beyond the reach of prior PSRO applications by considering 3- to 5-player poker games, yielding instances where $alpha$-Rank achieves faster convergence than approximate Nash solvers, thus establishing it as a favorable general games solver. We also carry out an initial empirical validation in MuJoCo soccer, illustrating the feasibility of the proposed approach in another complex domain.
Populating ontology graphs represents a long-standing problem for the Semantic Web community. Recent advances in translation-based graph embedding methods for populating instance-level knowledge graphs lead to promising new approaching for the ontology population problem. However, unlike instance-level graphs, the majority of relation facts in ontology graphs come with comprehensive semantic relations, which often include the properties of transitivity and symmetry, as well as hierarchical relations. These comprehensive relations are often too complex for existing graph embedding methods, and direct application of such methods is not feasible. Hence, we propose On2Vec, a novel translation-based graph embedding method for ontology population. On2Vec integrates two model components that effectively characterize comprehensive relation facts in ontology graphs. The first is the Component-specific Model that encodes concepts and relations into low-dimensional embedding spaces without a loss of relational properties; the second is the Hierarchy Model that performs focused learning of hierarchical relation facts. Experiments on several well-known ontology graphs demonstrate the promising capabilities of On2Vec in predicting and verifying new relation facts. These promising results also make possible significant improvements in related methods.
Reasoning in a temporal knowledge graph (TKG) is a critical task for information retrieval and semantic search. It is particularly challenging when the TKG is updated frequently. The model has to adapt to changes in the TKG for efficient training and inference while preserving its performance on historical knowledge. Recent work approaches TKG completion (TKGC) by augmenting the encoder-decoder framework with a time-aware encoding function. However, naively fine-tuning the model at every time step using these methods does not address the problems of 1) catastrophic forgetting, 2) the models inability to identify the change of facts (e.g., the change of the political affiliation and end of a marriage), and 3) the lack of training efficiency. To address these challenges, we present the Time-aware Incremental Embedding (TIE) framework, which combines TKG representation learning, experience replay, and temporal regularization. We introduce a set of metrics that characterizes the intransigence of the model and propose a constraint that associates the deleted facts with negative labels. Experimental results on Wikidata12k and YAGO11k datasets demonstrate that the proposed TIE framework reduces training time by about ten times and improves on the proposed metrics compared to vanilla full-batch training. It comes without a significant loss in performance for any traditional measures. Extensive ablation studies reveal performance trade-offs among different evaluation metrics, which is essential for decision-making around real-world TKG applications.