Beyond Gradient Averaging in Parallel Optimization: Improved Robustness through Gradient Agreement Filtering

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Chaubard, Francois, Eddy, Duncan, Kochenderfer, Mykel J.
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2024
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author Chaubard, Francois
Eddy, Duncan
Kochenderfer, Mykel J.
author_facet Chaubard, Francois
Eddy, Duncan
Kochenderfer, Mykel J.
contents We introduce Gradient Agreement Filtering (GAF) to improve on gradient averaging in distributed deep learning optimization. Traditional distributed data-parallel stochastic gradient descent involves averaging gradients of microbatches to calculate a macrobatch gradient that is then used to update model parameters. We find that gradients across microbatches are often orthogonal or negatively correlated, especially in late stages of training, which leads to memorization of the training set, reducing generalization. In this paper, we introduce a simple, computationally effective way to reduce gradient variance by computing the cosine distance between micro-gradients during training and filtering out conflicting updates prior to averaging. We improve validation accuracy with significantly smaller microbatch sizes. We also show this reduces memorizing noisy labels. We demonstrate the effectiveness of this technique on standard image classification benchmarks including CIFAR-100 and CIFAR-100N-Fine. We show this technique consistently outperforms validation accuracy, in some cases by up to 18.2\% compared to traditional training approaches while reducing the computation required nearly an order of magnitude because we can now rely on smaller microbatch sizes without destabilizing training.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2412_18052
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Beyond Gradient Averaging in Parallel Optimization: Improved Robustness through Gradient Agreement Filtering
Chaubard, Francois
Eddy, Duncan
Kochenderfer, Mykel J.
Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
We introduce Gradient Agreement Filtering (GAF) to improve on gradient averaging in distributed deep learning optimization. Traditional distributed data-parallel stochastic gradient descent involves averaging gradients of microbatches to calculate a macrobatch gradient that is then used to update model parameters. We find that gradients across microbatches are often orthogonal or negatively correlated, especially in late stages of training, which leads to memorization of the training set, reducing generalization. In this paper, we introduce a simple, computationally effective way to reduce gradient variance by computing the cosine distance between micro-gradients during training and filtering out conflicting updates prior to averaging. We improve validation accuracy with significantly smaller microbatch sizes. We also show this reduces memorizing noisy labels. We demonstrate the effectiveness of this technique on standard image classification benchmarks including CIFAR-100 and CIFAR-100N-Fine. We show this technique consistently outperforms validation accuracy, in some cases by up to 18.2\% compared to traditional training approaches while reducing the computation required nearly an order of magnitude because we can now rely on smaller microbatch sizes without destabilizing training.
title Beyond Gradient Averaging in Parallel Optimization: Improved Robustness through Gradient Agreement Filtering
topic Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.18052