Performance debugging in production is a fundamental activity in modern service-based systems. The diagnosis of performance issues is often time-consuming, since it requires thorough inspection of large volumes of traces and performance indices. In this paper we present DeLag, a novel automated search-based approach for diagnosing performance issues in service-based systems. DeLag identifies subsets of requests that show, in the combination of their Remote Procedure Call execution times, symptoms of potentially relevant performance issues. We call such symptoms Latency Degradation Patterns. DeLag simultaneously searches for multiple latency degradation patterns while optimizing precision, recall and latency dissimilarity. Experimentation on 700 datasets of requests generated from two microservice-based systems shows that our approach provides better and more stable effectiveness than three state-of-the-art approaches and general purpose machine learning clustering algorithms. DeLag is more effective than all baseline techniques in at least one case study (with p $\leq$ 0.05 and non-negligible effect size). Moreover, DeLag outperforms in terms of efficiency the second and the third most effective baseline techniques on the largest datasets used in our evaluation (up to 22%).
Mobile Device Location Data (MDLD) has been popularly utilized in various fields. Yet its large-scale applications are limited because of either biased or insufficient spatial coverage of the data from individual data vendors. One approach to improve the data coverage is to leverage the data from multiple data vendors and integrate them to build a more representative dataset. For data integration, further treatments on the multi-sourced dataset are required due to several reasons. First, the possibility of carrying more than one device could result in duplicated observations from the same data subject. Additionally, when utilizing multiple data sources, the same device might be captured by more than one data provider. Our paper proposes a data integration methodology for multi-sourced data to investigate the feasibility of integrating data from several sources without introducing additional biases to the data. By leveraging the uniqueness of travel pattern of each device, duplicate devices are identified. The proposed methodology is shown to be cost-effective while it achieves the desired accuracy level. Our findings suggest that devices sharing the same imputed home location and the top five most-visited locations during a month can represent the same user in the MDLD. It is shown that more than 99.6% of the sample devices having the aforementioned attribute in common are observed at the same location simultaneously. Finally, the proposed algorithm has been successfully applied to the national-level MDLD of 2020 to produce the national passenger origin-destination data for the NextGeneration National Household Travel Survey (NextGen NHTS) program.
Machine learning poses severe privacy concerns as it has been shown that the learned models can reveal sensitive information about their training data. Many works have investigated the effect of widely-adopted data augmentation (DA) and adversarial training (AT) techniques, termed data enhancement in the paper, on the privacy leakage of machine learning models. Such privacy effects are often measured by membership inference attacks (MIAs), which aim to identify whether a particular example belongs to the training set or not. We propose to investigate privacy from a new perspective called memorization. Through the lens of memorization, we find that previously deployed MIAs produce misleading results as they are less likely to identify samples with higher privacy risks as members compared to samples with low privacy risks. To solve this problem, we deploy a recent attack that can capture individual samples' memorization degrees for evaluation. Through extensive experiments, we unveil non-trivial findings about the connections between three essential properties of machine learning models, including privacy, generalization gap, and adversarial robustness. We demonstrate that, unlike existing results, the generalization gap is shown not highly correlated with privacy leakage. Moreover, stronger adversarial robustness does not necessarily imply that the model is more susceptible to privacy attacks.
Reinforcement learning (RL) has achieved promising results on most robotic control tasks. Safety of learning-based controllers is an essential notion of ensuring the effectiveness of the controllers. Current methods adopt whole consistency constraints during the training, thus resulting in inefficient exploration in the early stage. In this paper, we propose a Constrained Policy Optimization with Extra Safety Budget (ESB-CPO) algorithm to strike a balance between the exploration and the constraints. In the early stage, our method loosens the practical constraints of unsafe transitions (adding extra safety budget) with the aid of a new metric we propose. With the training process, the constraints in our optimization problem become tighter. Meanwhile, theoretical analysis and practical experiments demonstrate that our method gradually meets the cost limit's demand in the final training stage. When evaluated on Safety-Gym and Bullet-Safety-Gym benchmarks, our method has shown its advantages over baseline algorithms in terms of safety and optimality. Remarkably, our method gains remarkable performance improvement under the same cost limit compared with CPO algorithm.
An oft-cited challenge of federated learning is the presence of heterogeneity. \emph{Data heterogeneity} refers to the fact that data from different clients may follow very different distributions. \emph{System heterogeneity} refers to client devices having different system capabilities. A considerable number of federated optimization methods address this challenge. In the literature, empirical evaluations usually start federated training from random initialization. However, in many practical applications of federated learning, the server has access to proxy data for the training task that can be used to pre-train a model before starting federated training. Using four standard federated learning benchmark datasets, we empirically study the impact of starting from a pre-trained model in federated learning. Unsurprisingly, starting from a pre-trained model reduces the training time required to reach a target error rate and enables the training of more accurate models (up to 40\%) than is possible when starting from random initialization. Surprisingly, we also find that starting federated learning from a pre-trained initialization reduces the effect of both data and system heterogeneity. We recommend future work proposing and evaluating federated optimization methods to evaluate the performance when starting from random and pre-trained initializations. This study raises several questions for further work on understanding the role of heterogeneity in federated optimization.
Deep learning recommendation models (DLRMs) are used across many business-critical services at Facebook and are the single largest AI application in terms of infrastructure demand in its data-centers. In this paper we discuss the SW/HW co-designed solution for high-performance distributed training of large-scale DLRMs. We introduce a high-performance scalable software stack based on PyTorch and pair it with the new evolution of Zion platform, namely ZionEX. We demonstrate the capability to train very large DLRMs with up to 12 Trillion parameters and show that we can attain 40X speedup in terms of time to solution over previous systems. We achieve this by (i) designing the ZionEX platform with dedicated scale-out network, provisioned with high bandwidth, optimal topology and efficient transport (ii) implementing an optimized PyTorch-based training stack supporting both model and data parallelism (iii) developing sharding algorithms capable of hierarchical partitioning of the embedding tables along row, column dimensions and load balancing them across multiple workers; (iv) adding high-performance core operators while retaining flexibility to support optimizers with fully deterministic updates (v) leveraging reduced precision communications, multi-level memory hierarchy (HBM+DDR+SSD) and pipelining. Furthermore, we develop and briefly comment on distributed data ingestion and other supporting services that are required for the robust and efficient end-to-end training in production environments.
Dimensionality reduction (DR) plays a vital role in the visual analysis of high-dimensional data. One main aim of DR is to reveal hidden patterns that lie on intrinsic low-dimensional manifolds. However, DR often overlooks important patterns when the manifolds are distorted or masked by certain influential data attributes. This paper presents a feature learning framework, FEALM, designed to generate a set of optimized data projections for nonlinear DR in order to capture important patterns in the hidden manifolds. These projections produce maximally different nearest-neighbor graphs so that resultant DR outcomes are significantly different. To achieve such a capability, we design an optimization algorithm as well as introduce a new graph dissimilarity measure, named neighbor-shape dissimilarity. Additionally, we develop interactive visualizations to assist comparison of obtained DR results and interpretation of each DR result. We demonstrate FEALM's effectiveness through experiments and case studies using synthetic and real-world datasets.
Deep neural networks (DNNs) have achieved unprecedented success in the field of artificial intelligence (AI), including computer vision, natural language processing and speech recognition. However, their superior performance comes at the considerable cost of computational complexity, which greatly hinders their applications in many resource-constrained devices, such as mobile phones and Internet of Things (IoT) devices. Therefore, methods and techniques that are able to lift the efficiency bottleneck while preserving the high accuracy of DNNs are in great demand in order to enable numerous edge AI applications. This paper provides an overview of efficient deep learning methods, systems and applications. We start from introducing popular model compression methods, including pruning, factorization, quantization as well as compact model design. To reduce the large design cost of these manual solutions, we discuss the AutoML framework for each of them, such as neural architecture search (NAS) and automated pruning and quantization. We then cover efficient on-device training to enable user customization based on the local data on mobile devices. Apart from general acceleration techniques, we also showcase several task-specific accelerations for point cloud, video and natural language processing by exploiting their spatial sparsity and temporal/token redundancy. Finally, to support all these algorithmic advancements, we introduce the efficient deep learning system design from both software and hardware perspectives.
AI is undergoing a paradigm shift with the rise of models (e.g., BERT, DALL-E, GPT-3) that are trained on broad data at scale and are adaptable to a wide range of downstream tasks. We call these models foundation models to underscore their critically central yet incomplete character. This report provides a thorough account of the opportunities and risks of foundation models, ranging from their capabilities (e.g., language, vision, robotics, reasoning, human interaction) and technical principles(e.g., model architectures, training procedures, data, systems, security, evaluation, theory) to their applications (e.g., law, healthcare, education) and societal impact (e.g., inequity, misuse, economic and environmental impact, legal and ethical considerations). Though foundation models are based on standard deep learning and transfer learning, their scale results in new emergent capabilities,and their effectiveness across so many tasks incentivizes homogenization. Homogenization provides powerful leverage but demands caution, as the defects of the foundation model are inherited by all the adapted models downstream. Despite the impending widespread deployment of foundation models, we currently lack a clear understanding of how they work, when they fail, and what they are even capable of due to their emergent properties. To tackle these questions, we believe much of the critical research on foundation models will require deep interdisciplinary collaboration commensurate with their fundamentally sociotechnical nature.
Since deep neural networks were developed, they have made huge contributions to everyday lives. Machine learning provides more rational advice than humans are capable of in almost every aspect of daily life. However, despite this achievement, the design and training of neural networks are still challenging and unpredictable procedures. To lower the technical thresholds for common users, automated hyper-parameter optimization (HPO) has become a popular topic in both academic and industrial areas. This paper provides a review of the most essential topics on HPO. The first section introduces the key hyper-parameters related to model training and structure, and discusses their importance and methods to define the value range. Then, the research focuses on major optimization algorithms and their applicability, covering their efficiency and accuracy especially for deep learning networks. This study next reviews major services and toolkits for HPO, comparing their support for state-of-the-art searching algorithms, feasibility with major deep learning frameworks, and extensibility for new modules designed by users. The paper concludes with problems that exist when HPO is applied to deep learning, a comparison between optimization algorithms, and prominent approaches for model evaluation with limited computational resources.
With the rise and development of deep learning, computer vision has been tremendously transformed and reshaped. As an important research area in computer vision, scene text detection and recognition has been inescapably influenced by this wave of revolution, consequentially entering the era of deep learning. In recent years, the community has witnessed substantial advancements in mindset, approach and performance. This survey is aimed at summarizing and analyzing the major changes and significant progresses of scene text detection and recognition in the deep learning era. Through this article, we devote to: (1) introduce new insights and ideas; (2) highlight recent techniques and benchmarks; (3) look ahead into future trends. Specifically, we will emphasize the dramatic differences brought by deep learning and the grand challenges still remained. We expect that this review paper would serve as a reference book for researchers in this field. Related resources are also collected and compiled in our Github repository: //github.com/Jyouhou/SceneTextPapers.