arXiv subjects

Chenxuan Yao

Publications and source records attributed to Chenxuan Yao.

2 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Optimizing Frequent Checkpointing via Low-Cost Differential for Distributed Training Systems

Distributed training of large deep-learning models often leads to failures, so checkpointing is commonly employed for recovery. State-of-the-art studies focus on frequent checkpointing for fast recovery from failures. However, frequent checkpointing generates numerous checkpoints, incurring substantial costs and thus degrading training performance. Recently, differential checkpointing has been proposed to reduce costs, but it is limited to recommendation systems, so its application to general distributed training systems remains unexplored. In this paper, we find that gradients generated during distributed training can be reused to construct differential checkpoints, while the former's size is smaller than the latter's, motivating us to reuse gradients for low-cost differential checkpointing. Based on this main idea, we propose \sysname, a frequent checkpointing framework for compression-enabled training systems that reuses compressed gradients as differential checkpoints, eliminating redundant differential computation and reducing checkpoint transmission cost. Furthermore, we extend gradient reuse to scenarios without gradient compression and propose \sysnameplus, which employs layer-wise-reuse snapshotting and incremental-merging persistence to overlap checkpointing with training execution. Experiments on diverse workloads, including billion-parameter-scale models, demonstrate that \sysname and \sysnameplus significantly reduce checkpointing overhead and enable checkpointing at frequencies as high as once per iteration, reducing training time by up to 89.2\% and 81.2\%, respectively.

cs.DC↗

arXiv2023

Sampling-based Fast Gradient Rescaling Method for Highly Transferable Adversarial Attacks

Deep neural networks are known to be vulnerable to adversarial examples crafted by adding human-imperceptible perturbations to the benign input. After achieving nearly 100% attack success rates in white-box setting, more focus is shifted to black-box attacks, of which the transferability of adversarial examples has gained significant attention. In either case, the common gradient-based methods generally use the sign function to generate perturbations on the gradient update, that offers a roughly correct direction and has gained great success. But little work pays attention to its possible limitation. In this work, we observe that the deviation between the original gradient and the generated noise may lead to inaccurate gradient update estimation and suboptimal solutions for adversarial transferability. To this end, we propose a Sampling-based Fast Gradient Rescaling Method (S-FGRM). Specifically, we use data rescaling to substitute the sign function without extra computational cost. We further propose a Depth First Sampling method to eliminate the fluctuation of rescaling and stabilize the gradient update. Our method could be used in any gradient-based attacks and is extensible to be integrated with various input transformation or ensemble methods to further improve the adversarial transferability. Extensive experiments on the standard ImageNet dataset show that our method could significantly boost the transferability of gradient-based attacks and outperform the state-of-the-art baselines.

cs.CV↗