arXiv subjects

Wanling Gao

Publications and source records attributed to Wanling Gao.

At least 37 records · Page 2Linked to original sources

arXiv2023

AGIBench: A Multi-granularity, Multimodal, Human-referenced, Auto-scoring Benchmark for Large Language Models

Large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT have revealed amazing intelligence. How to evaluate the question-solving abilities of LLMs and their degrees of intelligence is a hot-spot but challenging issue. First, the question-solving abilities are interlaced with different ability branches like understanding and massive knowledge categories like mathematics. Second, the inputs of questions are multimodal that may involve text and images. Third, the response format of LLMs is diverse and thus poses great challenges for result extraction and evaluation. In this paper, we propose AGIBench -- a multi-granularity, multimodal, human-referenced, and auto-scoring benchmarking methodology for LLMs. Instead of a collection of blended questions, AGIBench focuses on three typical ability branches and adopts a four-tuple to label the attributes of each question. First, it supports multi-granularity benchmarking, e.g., per-question, per-ability branch, per-knowledge, per-modal, per-dataset, and per-difficulty level granularities. Second, it contains multimodal input, including text and images. Third, it classifies all the questions into five degrees of difficulty according to the average accuracy rate of abundant educated humans (human-referenced). Fourth, it adopts zero-shot learning to avoid introducing additional unpredictability and provides an auto-scoring method to extract and judge the result. Finally, it defines multi-dimensional metrics, including accuracy under the average, worst, best, and majority voting cases, and repeatability. AGIBench is publically available from \url{https://www.benchcouncil.org/agibench}.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2023

Does AI for science need another ImageNet Or totally different benchmarks? A case study of machine learning force fields

AI for science (AI4S) is an emerging research field that aims to enhance the accuracy and speed of scientific computing tasks using machine learning methods. Traditional AI benchmarking methods struggle to adapt to the unique challenges posed by AI4S because they assume data in training, testing, and future real-world queries are independent and identically distributed, while AI4S workloads anticipate out-of-distribution problem instances. This paper investigates the need for a novel approach to effectively benchmark AI for science, using the machine learning force field (MLFF) as a case study. MLFF is a method to accelerate molecular dynamics (MD) simulation with low computational cost and high accuracy. We identify various missed opportunities in scientifically meaningful benchmarking and propose solutions to evaluate MLFF models, specifically in the aspects of sample efficiency, time domain sensitivity, and cross-dataset generalization capabilities. By setting up the problem instantiation similar to the actual scientific applications, more meaningful performance metrics from the benchmark can be achieved. This suite of metrics has demonstrated a better ability to assess a model's performance in real-world scientific applications, in contrast to traditional AI benchmarking methodologies. This work is a component of the SAIBench project, an AI4S benchmarking suite. The project homepage is https://www.computercouncil.org/SAIBench.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2023

IterLara: A Turing Complete Algebra for Big Data, AI, Scientific Computing, and Database

\textsc{Lara} is a key-value algebra that aims at unifying linear and relational algebra with three types of operation abstraction. The study of \textsc{Lara}'s expressive ability reports that it can represent relational algebra and most linear algebra operations. However, several essential computations, such as matrix inversion and determinant, cannot be expressed in \textsc{Lara}. \textsc{Lara} cannot represent global and iterative computation, either. This article proposes \textsc{IterLara}, extending \textsc{Lara} with iterative operators, to provide an algebraic model that unifies operations in general-purpose computing, like big data, AI, scientific computing, and database. We study the expressive ability of \textsc{Lara} and \textsc{IterLara} and prove that \textsc{IterLara} with aggregation functions can represent matrix inversion, determinant. Besides, we demonstrate that \textsc{IterLara} with no limitation of function utility is Turing complete. We also propose the Operation Count (OP) as a metric of computation amount for \textsc{IterLara} and ensure that the OP metric is in accordance with the existing computation metrics.

cs.DB↗

arXiv2023

CMLCompiler: A Unified Compiler for Classical Machine Learning

Classical machine learning (CML) occupies nearly half of machine learning pipelines in production applications. Unfortunately, it fails to utilize the state-of-the-practice devices fully and performs poorly. Without a unified framework, the hybrid deployments of deep learning (DL) and CML also suffer from severe performance and portability issues. This paper presents the design of a unified compiler, called CMLCompiler, for CML inference. We propose two unified abstractions: operator representations and extended computational graphs. The CMLCompiler framework performs the conversion and graph optimization based on two unified abstractions, then outputs an optimized computational graph to DL compilers or frameworks. We implement CMLCompiler on TVM. The evaluation shows CMLCompiler's portability and superior performance. It achieves up to 4.38$\times$ speedup on CPU, 3.31$\times$ speedup on GPU, and 5.09$\times$ speedup on IoT devices, compared to the state-of-the-art solutions -- scikit-learn, intel sklearn, and hummingbird. Our performance of CML and DL mixed pipelines achieves up to 3.04x speedup compared with cross-framework implementations. The project documents and source code are available at https://www.computercouncil.org/cmlcompiler.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2023

WPC: Whole-picture Workload Characterization

This article raises an important and challenging workload characterization issue: can we uncover each critical component across the stacks contributing what percentages to any specific bottleneck? The typical critical components include languages, programming frameworks, runtime environments, instruction set architectures (ISA), operating systems (OS), and microarchitecture. Tackling this issue could help propose a systematic methodology to guide the software and hardware co-design and critical component optimizations. We propose a whole-picture workload characterization (WPC) methodology to answer the above issue. In essence, WPC is an iterative ORFE loop consisting of four steps: Observation, Reference, Fusion, and Exploration. WPC observes different level data (observation), fuses and normalizes the performance data (fusion) with respect to the well-designed standard reference workloads suite (reference), and explores the software and hardware co-design space (exploration) to investigate the impacts of critical components across the stacks. We build and open-source the WPC tool. Our evaluations confirm WPC can quantitatively reveal the contributions of the language, framework, runtime environment, ISA, OS, and microarchitecture to the primary pipeline efficiency.

cs.PF↗

arXiv2023

DCNetBench: Scaleable Data Center Network Benchmarking

Data center networking is the central infrastructure of the modern information society. However, benchmarking them is very challenging as the real-world network traffic is difficult to model, and Internet service giants treat the network traffic as confidential. Several industries have published a few publicly available network traces. However, these traces are collected from specific data center environments, e.g., applications, network topology, protocols, and hardware devices, and thus cannot be scaled to different users, underlying technologies, and varying benchmarking requirements. This article argues we should scale different data center applications and environments in designing, implementing, and evaluating data center networking benchmarking. We build DCNetBench, the first application-driven data center network benchmarking that can scale to different users, underlying technologies, and varying benchmarking requirements. The methodology is as follows. We built an emulated system that can simulate networking with different configurations. Then we run applications on the emulated systems to capture the realistic network traffic patterns; we analyze and classify these patterns to model and replay those traces. Finally, we provide an automatic benchmarking framework to support this pipeline. The evaluations on DCNetBench show its scaleability, effectiveness, and diversity for data center network benchmarking.

cs.NI↗

arXiv2022

ToL: A Tensor of List-Based Unified Computation Model

Previous computation models either have equivalent abilities in representing all computations but fail to provide primitive operators for programming complex algorithms or lack generalized expression ability to represent newly-added computations. This article presents a unified computation model with generalized expression ability and a concise set of primitive operators for programming high-level algorithms. We propose a unified data abstraction -- Tensor of List, and offer a unified computation model based on Tensor of List, which we call the ToL model (in short, ToL). ToL introduces five atomic computations that can represent any elementary computation by finite composition, ensured with strict formal proof. Based on ToL, we design a pure-functional language -- ToLang. ToLang provides a concise set of primitive operators that can be used to program complex big data and AI algorithms. Our evaluations show ToL has generalized expression ability and a built-in performance indicator, born with a strictly defined computation metric -- elementary operation count (EOPs), consistent with FLOPs within a small error range.

cs.PL↗

arXiv2022

High fusion computers: The IoTs, edges, data centers, and humans-in-the-loop as a computer

Emerging and future applications rely heavily upon systems consisting of Internet of Things (IoT), edges, data centers, and humans-in-the-loop. Significantly different from warehouse-scale computers that serve independent concurrent user requests, this new class of computer systems directly interacts with the physical world, considering humans an essential part and performing safety-critical and mission-critical operations; their computations have intertwined dependencies between not only adjacent execution loops but also actions or decisions triggered by IoTs, edge, datacenters, or humans-in-the-loop; the systems must first satisfy the accuracy metric in predicting, interpreting, or taking action before meeting the performance goal under different cases. This article argues we need a paradigm shift to reconstruct the IoTs, edges, data centers, and humans-in-the-loop as a computer rather than a distributed system. We coin a new term, high fusion computers (HFCs), to describe this class of systems. The fusion in the term has two implications: fusing IoTs, edges, data centers, and humans-in-the-loop as a computer, fusing the physical and digital worlds through HFC systems. HFC is a pivotal case of the open-source computer systems initiative. We laid out the challenges, plan, and call for uniting our community's wisdom and actions to address the HFC challenges. Everything, including the source code, will be publicly available from the project homepage: https://www.computercouncil.org/HFC/.

cs.DC↗

arXiv2022

OLxPBench: Real-time, Semantically Consistent, and Domain-specific are Essential in Benchmarking, Designing, and Implementing HTAP Systems

As real-time analysis of the new data become increasingly compelling, more organizations deploy Hybrid Transactional/Analytical Processing (HTAP) systems to support real-time queries on data recently generated by online transaction processing. This paper argues that real-time queries, semantically consistent schema, and domain-specific workloads are essential in benchmarking, designing, and implementing HTAP systems. However, most state-of-the-art and state-of-the-practice benchmarks ignore those critical factors. Hence, they are incommensurable and, at worst, misleading in benchmarking, designing, and implementing HTAP systems. This paper presents OLxPBench, a composite HTAP benchmark suite. OLxPBench proposes: (1) the abstraction of a hybrid transaction, performing a real-time query in-between an online transaction, to model widely-observed behavior pattern -- making a quick decision while consulting real-time analysis; (2) a semantically consistent schema to express the relationships between OLTP and OLAP schema; (3) the combination of domain-specific and general benchmarks to characterize diverse application scenarios with varying resource demands. Our evaluations justify the three design decisions of OLxPBench and pinpoint the bottlenecks of two mainstream distributed HTAP DBMSs. International Open Benchmark Council (BenchCouncil) sets up the OLxPBench homepage at https://www.benchcouncil.org/olxpbench/. Its source code is available from https://github.com/BenchCouncil/olxpbench.git.

cs.DB↗

arXiv2021

AIBench Scenario: Scenario-distilling AI Benchmarking

Modern real-world application scenarios like Internet services consist of a diversity of AI and non-AI modules with huge code sizes and long and complicated execution paths, which raises serious benchmarking or evaluating challenges. Using AI components or micro benchmarks alone can lead to error-prone conclusions. This paper presents a methodology to attack the above challenge. We formalize a real-world application scenario as a Directed Acyclic Graph-based model and propose the rules to distill it into a permutation of essential AI and non-AI tasks, which we call a scenario benchmark. Together with seventeen industry partners, we extract nine typical scenario benchmarks. We design and implement an extensible, configurable, and flexible benchmark framework. We implement two Internet service AI scenario benchmarks based on the framework as proxies to two real-world application scenarios. We consider scenario, component, and micro benchmarks as three indispensable parts for evaluating. Our evaluation shows the advantage of our methodology against using component or micro AI benchmarks alone. The specifications, source code, testbed, and results are publicly available from \url{https://www.benchcouncil.org/aibench/scenario/}.

cs.PF↗

arXiv2021

Shift-and-Balance Attention

Attention is an effective mechanism to improve the deep model capability. Squeeze-and-Excite (SE) introduces a light-weight attention branch to enhance the network's representational power. The attention branch is gated using the Sigmoid function and multiplied by the feature map's trunk branch. It is too sensitive to coordinate and balance the trunk and attention branches' contributions. To control the attention branch's influence, we propose a new attention method, called Shift-and-Balance (SB). Different from Squeeze-and-Excite, the attention branch is regulated by the learned control factor to control the balance, then added into the feature map's trunk branch. Experiments show that Shift-and-Balance attention significantly improves the accuracy compared to Squeeze-and-Excite when applied in more layers, increasing more size and capacity of a network. Moreover, Shift-and-Balance attention achieves better or close accuracy compared to the state-of-art Dynamic Convolution.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2021

AIBench Training: Balanced Industry-Standard AI Training Benchmarking

Earlier-stage evaluations of a new AI architecture/system need affordable benchmarks. Only using a few AI component benchmarks like MLPerfalone in the other stages may lead to misleading conclusions. Moreover, the learning dynamics are not well understood, and the benchmarks' shelf-life is short. This paper proposes a balanced benchmarking methodology. We use real-world benchmarks to cover the factors space that impacts the learning dynamics to the most considerable extent. After performing an exhaustive survey on Internet service AI domains, we identify and implement nineteen representative AI tasks with state-of-the-art models. For repeatable performance ranking (RPR subset) and workload characterization (WC subset), we keep two subsets to a minimum for affordability. We contribute by far the most comprehensive AI training benchmark suite. The evaluations show: (1) AIBench Training (v1.1) outperforms MLPerfTraining (v0.7) in terms of diversity and representativeness of model complexity, computational cost, convergent rate, computation, and memory access patterns, and hotspot functions; (2) Against the AIBench full benchmarks, its RPR subset shortens the benchmarking cost by 64%, while maintaining the primary workload characteristics; (3) The performance ranking shows the single-purpose AI accelerator like TPU with the optimized TensorFlowframework performs better than that of GPUs while losing the latter's general support for various AI models. The specification, source code, and performance numbers are available from the AIBench homepage https://www.benchcouncil.org/aibench-training/index.html.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2021

HPC AI500: Representative, Repeatable and Simple HPC AI Benchmarking

Recent years witness a trend of applying large-scale distributed deep learning algorithms (HPC AI) in both business and scientific computing areas, whose goal is to speed up the training time to achieve a state-of-the-art quality. The HPC AI benchmarks accelerate the process. Unfortunately, benchmarking HPC AI systems at scale raises serious challenges. This paper presents a representative, repeatable and simple HPC AI benchmarking methodology. Among the seventeen AI workloads of AIBench Training -- by far the most comprehensive AI Training benchmarks suite -- we choose two representative and repeatable AI workloads. The selected HPC AI benchmarks include both business and scientific computing: Image Classification and Extreme Weather Analytics. To rank HPC AI systems, we present a new metric named Valid FLOPS, emphasizing both throughput performance and a target quality. The specification, source code, datasets, and HPC AI500 ranking numbers are publicly available from \url{https://www.benchcouncil.org/HPCAI500/}.

cs.PF↗

arXiv2020

HPC AI500: The Methodology, Tools, Roofline Performance Models, and Metrics for Benchmarking HPC AI Systems

The recent years witness a trend of applying large-scale distributed deep learning in both business and scientific computing areas, whose goal is to speed up the training time to achieve a state-of-the-art quality. The HPC community feels a great interest in building the HPC AI systems that are dedicated to running those workloads. The HPC AI benchmarks accelerate the process. Unfortunately, benchmarking HPC AI systems at scale raises serious challenges. None of previous HPC AI benchmarks achieve the goal of being equivalent, relevant, representative, affordable, and repeatable. This paper presents a comprehensive methodology, tools, Roofline performance models, and innovative metrics for benchmarking, optimizing, and ranking HPC AI systems, which we call HPC AI500 V2.0. We abstract the HPC AI system into nine independent layers, and present explicit benchmarking rules and procedures to assure equivalence of each layer, repeatability, and replicability. On the basis of AIBench -- by far the most comprehensive AI benchmarks suite, we present and build two HPC AI benchmarks from both business and scientific computing: Image Classification, and Extreme Weather Analytics, achieving both representativeness and affordability. To rank the performance and energy-efficiency of HPC AI systems, we propose Valid FLOPS, and Valid FLOPS per watt, which impose a penalty on failing to achieve the target quality. We propose using convolution and GEMM -- the two most intensively-used kernel functions to measure the upper bound performance of the HPC AI systems, and present HPC AI roofline models for guiding performance optimizations. The evaluations show our methodology, benchmarks, performance models, and metrics can measure, optimize, and rank the HPC AI systems in a scalable, simple, and affordable way. HPC AI500 V2.0 are publicly available from http://www.benchcouncil.org/benchhub/hpc-ai500-benchmark.

cs.PF↗

arXiv2020

Finet: Using Fine-grained Batch Normalization to Train Light-weight Neural Networks

To build light-weight network, we propose a new normalization, Fine-grained Batch Normalization (FBN). Different from Batch Normalization (BN), which normalizes the final summation of the weighted inputs, FBN normalizes the intermediate state of the summation. We propose a novel light-weight network based on FBN, called Finet. At training time, the convolutional layer with FBN can be seen as an inverted bottleneck mechanism. FBN can be fused into convolution at inference time. After fusion, Finet uses the standard convolution with equal channel width, thus makes the inference more efficient. On ImageNet classification dataset, Finet achieves the state-of-art performance (65.706% accuracy with 43M FLOPs, and 73.786% accuracy with 303M FLOPs), Moreover, experiments show that Finet is more efficient than other state-of-art light-weight networks.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2020

Comparison and Benchmarking of AI Models and Frameworks on Mobile Devices

Due to increasing amounts of data and compute resources, deep learning achieves many successes in various domains. The application of deep learning on the mobile and embedded devices is taken more and more attentions, benchmarking and ranking the AI abilities of mobile and embedded devices becomes an urgent problem to be solved. Considering the model diversity and framework diversity, we propose a benchmark suite, AIoTBench, which focuses on the evaluation of the inference abilities of mobile and embedded devices. AIoTBench covers three typical heavy-weight networks: ResNet50, InceptionV3, DenseNet121, as well as three light-weight networks: SqueezeNet, MobileNetV2, MnasNet. Each network is implemented by three frameworks which are designed for mobile and embedded devices: Tensorflow Lite, Caffe2, Pytorch Mobile. To compare and rank the AI capabilities of the devices, we propose two unified metrics as the AI scores: Valid Images Per Second (VIPS) and Valid FLOPs Per Second (VOPS). Currently, we have compared and ranked 5 mobile devices using our benchmark. This list will be extended and updated soon after.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2020

Extended Batch Normalization

Batch normalization (BN) has become a standard technique for training the modern deep networks. However, its effectiveness diminishes when the batch size becomes smaller, since the batch statistics estimation becomes inaccurate. That hinders batch normalization's usage for 1) training larger model which requires small batches constrained by memory consumption, 2) training on mobile or embedded devices of which the memory resource is limited. In this paper, we propose a simple but effective method, called extended batch normalization (EBN). For NCHW format feature maps, extended batch normalization computes the mean along the (N, H, W) dimensions, as the same as batch normalization, to maintain the advantage of batch normalization. To alleviate the problem caused by small batch size, extended batch normalization computes the standard deviation along the (N, C, H, W) dimensions, thus enlarges the number of samples from which the standard deviation is computed. We compare extended batch normalization with batch normalization and group normalization on the datasets of MNIST, CIFAR-10/100, STL-10, and ImageNet, respectively. The experiments show that extended batch normalization alleviates the problem of batch normalization with small batch size while achieving close performances to batch normalization with large batch size.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2020

AIBench: An Agile Domain-specific Benchmarking Methodology and an AI Benchmark Suite

Domain-specific software and hardware co-design is encouraging as it is much easier to achieve efficiency for fewer tasks. Agile domain-specific benchmarking speeds up the process as it provides not only relevant design inputs but also relevant metrics, and tools. Unfortunately, modern workloads like Big data, AI, and Internet services dwarf the traditional one in terms of code size, deployment scale, and execution path, and hence raise serious benchmarking challenges. This paper proposes an agile domain-specific benchmarking methodology. Together with seventeen industry partners, we identify ten important end-to-end application scenarios, among which sixteen representative AI tasks are distilled as the AI component benchmarks. We propose the permutations of essential AI and non-AI component benchmarks as end-to-end benchmarks. An end-to-end benchmark is a distillation of the essential attributes of an industry-scale application. We design and implement a highly extensible, configurable, and flexible benchmark framework, on the basis of which, we propose the guideline for building end-to-end benchmarks, and present the first end-to-end Internet service AI benchmark. The preliminary evaluation shows the value of our benchmark suite---AIBench against MLPerf and TailBench for hardware and software designers, micro-architectural researchers, and code developers. The specifications, source code, testbed, and results are publicly available from the web site \url{http://www.benchcouncil.org/AIBench/index.html}.

cs.PF↗