Matthai Philipose

Lequn Chen, Weixin Deng, Anirudh Canumalla et al.

Having large batch sizes is one of the most critical aspects of increasing the accelerator efficiency and the performance of DNN model inference. However, existing model serving systems cannot achieve adequate batch sizes while meeting latency objectives as these systems eagerly dispatch requests to accelerators to minimize the accelerator idle time. We propose Symphony, a DNN serving system that explores deferred batch scheduling to optimize system efficiency and throughput. Further, unlike other prior systems, Symphony's GPU usage is load-proportional: it consolidates workloads on the appropriate number of GPUs and works smoothly with cluster auto-scaling tools. Symphony consists of two core design points. First, Symphony defines a schedulable window in which a batch of inference requests can be dispatched. This window is computed in order to improve accelerator efficiency while meeting the request's SLO. Second, Symphony implements a scalable, low-latency, fine-grained coordination scheme across accelerators to dispatch and execute requests in the schedulable window. Through extensive scheduler-only benchmarks, we demonstrate that Symphony can schedule millions of requests per second and coordinate thousands of GPUs while also enabling robust autoscaling that adapts to workload changes. Symphony outperforms prior systems by achieving 5x higher goodput when given the same number of GPUs and 60% reduction in GPUs when given the same workload.

Hyunseok Oh, Sam Stern, Youngki Lee et al.

Natural language understanding requires interleaving textual and logical reasoning, yet large language models often fail to perform such reasoning reliably. Existing neurosymbolic systems combine LLMs with solvers but remain limited to fully formalizable tasks such as math or program synthesis, leaving natural documents with only partial logical structure unaddressed. We introduce Logitext, a neurosymbolic language that represents documents as natural language text constraints (NLTCs), making partial logical structure explicit. We develop an algorithm that integrates LLM-based constraint evaluation with satisfiability modulo theory (SMT) solving, enabling joint textual-logical reasoning. Experiments on a new content moderation benchmark, together with LegalBench and Super-Natural Instructions, show that Logitext improves both accuracy and coverage. This work is the first that treats LLM-based reasoning as an SMT theory, extending neurosymbolic methods beyond fully formalizable domains.

Josh Fromm, Shwetak Patel, Matthai Philipose

Recent work has shown that fast, compact low-bitwidth neural networks can be surprisingly accurate. These networks use homogeneous binarization: all parameters in each layer or (more commonly) the whole model have the same low bitwidth (e.g., 2 bits). However, modern hardware allows efficient designs where each arithmetic instruction can have a custom bitwidth, motivating heterogeneous binarization, where every parameter in the network may have a different bitwidth. In this paper, we show that it is feasible and useful to select bitwidths at the parameter granularity during training. For instance a heterogeneously quantized version of modern networks such as AlexNet and MobileNet, with the right mix of 1-, 2- and 3-bit parameters that average to just 1.4 bits can equal the accuracy of homogeneous 2-bit versions of these networks. Further, we provide analyses to show that the heterogeneously binarized systems yield FPGA- and ASIC-based implementations that are correspondingly more efficient in both circuit area and energy efficiency than their homogeneous counterparts.

Kevin Hsieh, Ganesh Ananthanarayanan, Peter Bodik et al.

Large volumes of videos are continuously recorded from cameras deployed for traffic control and surveillance with the goal of answering "after the fact" queries: identify video frames with objects of certain classes (cars, bags) from many days of recorded video. While advancements in convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have enabled answering such queries with high accuracy, they are too expensive and slow. We build Focus, a system for low-latency and low-cost querying on large video datasets. Focus uses cheap ingestion techniques to index the videos by the objects occurring in them. At ingest-time, it uses compression and video-specific specialization of CNNs. Focus handles the lower accuracy of the cheap CNNs by judiciously leveraging expensive CNNs at query-time. To reduce query time latency, we cluster similar objects and hence avoid redundant processing. Using experiments on video streams from traffic, surveillance and news channels, we see that Focus uses 58X fewer GPU cycles than running expensive ingest processors and is 37X faster than processing all the video at query time.

Jong Hwan Ko, Josh Fromm, Matthai Philipose et al.

While deep neural networks have shown powerful performance in many audio applications, their large computation and memory demand has been a challenge for real-time processing. In this paper, we study the impact of scaling the precision of neural networks on the performance of two common audio processing tasks, namely, voice-activity detection and single-channel speech enhancement. We determine the optimal pair of weight/neuron bit precision by exploring its impact on both the performance and processing time. Through experiments conducted with real user data, we demonstrate that deep neural networks that use lower bit precision significantly reduce the processing time (up to 30x). However, their performance impact is low (< 3.14%) only in the case of classification tasks such as those present in voice activity detection.

Haichen Shen, Seungyeop Han, Matthai Philipose et al.

Recent advances have enabled "oracle" classifiers that can classify across many classes and input distributions with high accuracy without retraining. However, these classifiers are relatively heavyweight, so that applying them to classify video is costly. We show that day-to-day video exhibits highly skewed class distributions over the short term, and that these distributions can be classified by much simpler models. We formulate the problem of detecting the short-term skews online and exploiting models based on it as a new sequential decision making problem dubbed the Online Bandit Problem, and present a new algorithm to solve it. When applied to recognizing faces in TV shows and movies, we realize end-to-end classification speedups of 2.4-7.8x/2.6-11.2x (on GPU/CPU) relative to a state-of-the-art convolutional neural network, at competitive accuracy.

Gregor Urban, Krzysztof J. Geras, Samira Ebrahimi Kahou et al.

Yes, they do. This paper provides the first empirical demonstration that deep convolutional models really need to be both deep and convolutional, even when trained with methods such as distillation that allow small or shallow models of high accuracy to be trained. Although previous research showed that shallow feed-forward nets sometimes can learn the complex functions previously learned by deep nets while using the same number of parameters as the deep models they mimic, in this paper we demonstrate that the same methods cannot be used to train accurate models on CIFAR-10 unless the student models contain multiple layers of convolution. Although the student models do not have to be as deep as the teacher model they mimic, the students need multiple convolutional layers to learn functions of comparable accuracy as the deep convolutional teacher.

Krzysztof J. Geras, Abdel-rahman Mohamed, Rich Caruana et al.

We consider whether deep convolutional networks (CNNs) can represent decision functions with similar accuracy as recurrent networks such as LSTMs. First, we show that a deep CNN with an architecture inspired by the models recently introduced in image recognition can yield better accuracy than previous convolutional and LSTM networks on the standard 309h Switchboard automatic speech recognition task. Then we show that even more accurate CNNs can be trained under the guidance of LSTMs using a variant of model compression, which we call model blending because the teacher and student models are similar in complexity but different in inductive bias. Blending further improves the accuracy of our CNN, yielding a computationally efficient model of accuracy higher than any of the other individual models. Examining the effect of "dark knowledge" in this model compression task, we find that less than 1% of the highest probability labels are needed for accurate model compression.