Accelerating Neural Network Training: An Analysis of the AlgoPerf Competition

Fuente: arXiv
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Auteurs principaux: Kasimbeg, Priya, Schneider, Frank, Eschenhagen, Runa, Bae, Juhan, Sastry, Chandramouli Shama, Saroufim, Mark, Feng, Boyuan, Wright, Less, Yang, Edward Z., Nado, Zachary, Medapati, Sourabh, Hennig, Philipp, Rabbat, Michael, Dahl, George E.
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2025
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author Kasimbeg, Priya
Schneider, Frank
Eschenhagen, Runa
Bae, Juhan
Sastry, Chandramouli Shama
Saroufim, Mark
Feng, Boyuan
Wright, Less
Yang, Edward Z.
Nado, Zachary
Medapati, Sourabh
Hennig, Philipp
Rabbat, Michael
Dahl, George E.
author_facet Kasimbeg, Priya
Schneider, Frank
Eschenhagen, Runa
Bae, Juhan
Sastry, Chandramouli Shama
Saroufim, Mark
Feng, Boyuan
Wright, Less
Yang, Edward Z.
Nado, Zachary
Medapati, Sourabh
Hennig, Philipp
Rabbat, Michael
Dahl, George E.
contents The goal of the AlgoPerf: Training Algorithms competition is to evaluate practical speed-ups in neural network training achieved solely by improving the underlying training algorithms. In the external tuning ruleset, submissions must provide workload-agnostic hyperparameter search spaces, while in the self-tuning ruleset they must be completely hyperparameter-free. In both rulesets, submissions are compared on time-to-result across multiple deep learning workloads, training on fixed hardware. This paper presents the inaugural AlgoPerf competition's results, which drew 18 diverse submissions from 10 teams. Our investigation reveals several key findings: (1) The winning submission in the external tuning ruleset, using Distributed Shampoo, demonstrates the effectiveness of non-diagonal preconditioning over popular methods like Adam, even when compared on wall-clock runtime. (2) The winning submission in the self-tuning ruleset, based on the Schedule Free AdamW algorithm, demonstrates a new level of effectiveness for completely hyperparameter-free training algorithms. (3) The top-scoring submissions were surprisingly robust to workload changes. We also discuss the engineering challenges encountered in ensuring a fair comparison between different training algorithms. These results highlight both the significant progress so far, and the considerable room for further improvements.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2502_15015
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Accelerating Neural Network Training: An Analysis of the AlgoPerf Competition
Kasimbeg, Priya
Schneider, Frank
Eschenhagen, Runa
Bae, Juhan
Sastry, Chandramouli Shama
Saroufim, Mark
Feng, Boyuan
Wright, Less
Yang, Edward Z.
Nado, Zachary
Medapati, Sourabh
Hennig, Philipp
Rabbat, Michael
Dahl, George E.
Machine Learning
The goal of the AlgoPerf: Training Algorithms competition is to evaluate practical speed-ups in neural network training achieved solely by improving the underlying training algorithms. In the external tuning ruleset, submissions must provide workload-agnostic hyperparameter search spaces, while in the self-tuning ruleset they must be completely hyperparameter-free. In both rulesets, submissions are compared on time-to-result across multiple deep learning workloads, training on fixed hardware. This paper presents the inaugural AlgoPerf competition's results, which drew 18 diverse submissions from 10 teams. Our investigation reveals several key findings: (1) The winning submission in the external tuning ruleset, using Distributed Shampoo, demonstrates the effectiveness of non-diagonal preconditioning over popular methods like Adam, even when compared on wall-clock runtime. (2) The winning submission in the self-tuning ruleset, based on the Schedule Free AdamW algorithm, demonstrates a new level of effectiveness for completely hyperparameter-free training algorithms. (3) The top-scoring submissions were surprisingly robust to workload changes. We also discuss the engineering challenges encountered in ensuring a fair comparison between different training algorithms. These results highlight both the significant progress so far, and the considerable room for further improvements.
title Accelerating Neural Network Training: An Analysis of the AlgoPerf Competition
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.15015