Chao Ma

Da Zheng, Chao Ma, Minjie Wang et al.

Graph neural networks (GNN) have shown great success in learning from graph-structured data. They are widely used in various applications, such as recommendation, fraud detection, and search. In these domains, the graphs are typically large, containing hundreds of millions of nodes and several billions of edges. To tackle this challenge, we develop DistDGL, a system for training GNNs in a mini-batch fashion on a cluster of machines. DistDGL is based on the Deep Graph Library (DGL), a popular GNN development framework. DistDGL distributes the graph and its associated data (initial features and embeddings) across the machines and uses this distribution to derive a computational decomposition by following an owner-compute rule. DistDGL follows a synchronous training approach and allows ego-networks forming the mini-batches to include non-local nodes. To minimize the overheads associated with distributed computations, DistDGL uses a high-quality and light-weight min-cut graph partitioning algorithm along with multiple balancing constraints. This allows it to reduce communication overheads and statically balance the computations. It further reduces the communication by replicating halo nodes and by using sparse embedding updates. The combination of these design choices allows DistDGL to train high-quality models while achieving high parallel efficiency and memory scalability. We demonstrate our optimizations on both inductive and transductive GNN models. Our results show that DistDGL achieves linear speedup without compromising model accuracy and requires only 13 seconds to complete a training epoch for a graph with 100 million nodes and 3 billion edges on a cluster with 16 machines. DistDGL is now publicly available as part of DGL:https://github.com/dmlc/dgl/tree/master/python/dgl/distributed.

Yincen Qu, Chao Ma, Xiangying Dai et al.

In the industry, numerous tasks are deployed online. Traditional approaches often tackle each task separately by its own network, which leads to excessive costs for developing and scaling models, especially in the context of large language models. Although multi-task methods can save costs through parameter sharing, they often struggle to outperform single-task methods in real-world applications. To tackle these challenges, we present a three-stage multi-task learning framework for large language models. It involves task filtering, followed by fine-tuning on high-resource tasks, and finally fine-tuning on all tasks. We conducted comprehensive experiments in single-task and multi-task settings. Our approach, exemplified on different benchmarks, demonstrates that it is able to achieve performance comparable to the single-task method while reducing up to 90.9\% of its overhead.

Shuai Xie, Zunlei Feng, Ying Chen et al.

Active learning aims to address the paucity of labeled data by finding the most informative samples. However, when applying to semantic segmentation, existing methods ignore the segmentation difficulty of different semantic areas, which leads to poor performance on those hard semantic areas such as tiny or slender objects. To deal with this problem, we propose a semantic Difficulty-awarE Active Learning (DEAL) network composed of two branches: the common segmentation branch and the semantic difficulty branch. For the latter branch, with the supervision of segmentation error between the segmentation result and GT, a pixel-wise probability attention module is introduced to learn the semantic difficulty scores for different semantic areas. Finally, two acquisition functions are devised to select the most valuable samples with semantic difficulty. Competitive results on semantic segmentation benchmarks demonstrate that DEAL achieves state-of-the-art active learning performance and improves the performance of the hard semantic areas in particular.

Minjie Wang, Da Zheng, Zihao Ye et al.

Advancing research in the emerging field of deep graph learning requires new tools to support tensor computation over graphs. In this paper, we present the design principles and implementation of Deep Graph Library (DGL). DGL distills the computational patterns of GNNs into a few generalized sparse tensor operations suitable for extensive parallelization. By advocating graph as the central programming abstraction, DGL can perform optimizations transparently. By cautiously adopting a framework-neutral design, DGL allows users to easily port and leverage the existing components across multiple deep learning frameworks. Our evaluation shows that DGL significantly outperforms other popular GNN-oriented frameworks in both speed and memory consumption over a variety of benchmarks and has little overhead for small scale workloads.