Efficient Distributed Training through Gradient Compression with Sparsification and Quantization Techniques

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Hauptverfasser: Singh, Shruti, Kumar, Shantanu
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2024
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author Singh, Shruti
Kumar, Shantanu
author_facet Singh, Shruti
Kumar, Shantanu
contents This study investigates the impact of gradient compression on distributed training performance, focusing on sparsification and quantization techniques, including top-k, DGC, and QSGD. In baseline experiments, random-k compression results in severe performance degradation, highlighting its inefficacy. In contrast, using top-k and DGC at 50 times compression yields performance improvements, reducing perplexity by up to 0.06 compared to baseline. Experiments across 1, 2, and 4 workers demonstrate that conservative sparsification can have a regularizing effect, especially for smaller models, while compression ratios above 5000 times impair performance, particularly for DGC. Communication times are reduced across all compression methods, with top-k and DGC decreasing communication to negligible levels at high compression ratios. However, increased computation times offset this efficiency for top-k due to sorting demands, making it less scalable than DGC or QSGD. In convergence tests, sparsification techniques show accelerated convergence, requiring fewer epochs than the baseline, which has implications for computational savings. Although precision trade-offs emerge, floating point errors are mitigated by compression. This study's findings underscore the need to tune hyperparameters specifically for each compression technique to achieve optimal model performance, especially in distributed training systems.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2502_07634
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Efficient Distributed Training through Gradient Compression with Sparsification and Quantization Techniques
Singh, Shruti
Kumar, Shantanu
Machine Learning
Multimedia
This study investigates the impact of gradient compression on distributed training performance, focusing on sparsification and quantization techniques, including top-k, DGC, and QSGD. In baseline experiments, random-k compression results in severe performance degradation, highlighting its inefficacy. In contrast, using top-k and DGC at 50 times compression yields performance improvements, reducing perplexity by up to 0.06 compared to baseline. Experiments across 1, 2, and 4 workers demonstrate that conservative sparsification can have a regularizing effect, especially for smaller models, while compression ratios above 5000 times impair performance, particularly for DGC. Communication times are reduced across all compression methods, with top-k and DGC decreasing communication to negligible levels at high compression ratios. However, increased computation times offset this efficiency for top-k due to sorting demands, making it less scalable than DGC or QSGD. In convergence tests, sparsification techniques show accelerated convergence, requiring fewer epochs than the baseline, which has implications for computational savings. Although precision trade-offs emerge, floating point errors are mitigated by compression. This study's findings underscore the need to tune hyperparameters specifically for each compression technique to achieve optimal model performance, especially in distributed training systems.
title Efficient Distributed Training through Gradient Compression with Sparsification and Quantization Techniques
topic Machine Learning
Multimedia
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.07634