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arXiv · 2007.00784

Convolutional Neural Network Training with Distributed K-FAC

J. Gregory Pauloski·Zhao Zhang·Lei Huang·Weijia Xu·Ian T. Foster
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Abstract

Training neural networks with many processors can reduce time-to-solution; however, it is challenging to maintain convergence and efficiency at large scales. The Kronecker-factored Approximate Curvature (K-FAC) was recently proposed as an approximation of the Fisher Information Matrix that can be used in natural gradient optimizers. We investigate here a scalable K-FAC design and its applicability in convolutional neural network (CNN) training at scale. We study optimization techniques such as layer-wise distribution strategies, inverse-free second-order gradient evaluation, and dynamic K-FAC update decoupling to reduce training time while preserving convergence. We use residual neural networks (ResNet) applied to the CIFAR-10 and ImageNet-1k datasets to evaluate the correctness and scalability of our K-FAC gradient preconditioner. With ResNet-50 on the ImageNet-1k dataset, our distributed K-FAC implementation converges to the 75.9% MLPerf baseline in 18-25% less time than does the classic stochastic gradient descent (SGD) optimizer across scales on a GPU cluster.

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BibTeXRIS

J. Gregory Pauloski, Zhao Zhang, Lei Huang, Weijia Xu, Ian T. Foster. 2020-07-01. Convolutional Neural Network Training with Distributed K-FAC. https://arxiv.org/abs/2007.00784

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