Jian Sha

Jialiang Cheng, Ning Gao, Yun Yue et al.

Distributed training methods are crucial for large language models (LLMs). However, existing distributed training methods often suffer from communication bottlenecks, stragglers, and limited elasticity, particularly in heterogeneous or large-scale environments. Local SGD methods have been proposed to address these issues, but their effectiveness remains limited to small-scale training due to additional memory overhead and lack of concerns on efficiency and stability. To tackle these issues, we propose EDiT, an innovative Efficient Distributed Training method that combines a tailored Local SGD approach with model sharding techniques to enhance large-scale training efficiency. EDiT performs layer-wise parameter synchronization during forward pass, reducing communication and memory overhead and enabling overlap. Besides, EDiT employs a pseudo gradient penalty strategy to suppress loss spikes, which ensures training stability and improves performance. Additionally, we introduce A-EDiT, a fully asynchronous variant of EDiT that accommodates heterogeneous clusters. Building on EDiT/A-EDiT, we conduct a series of experiments to validate large-scale asynchronous training for LLMs, accompanied by comprehensive analyses. Experimental results demonstrate the superior performance of EDiT/A-EDiT, establishing them as robust solutions for distributed LLM training in diverse computational ecosystems. The code is available at Atorch codebase: https://github.com/intelligent-machine-learning/atorch/tree/main/atorch/local_sgd.

Zhengmao Ye, Dengchun Li, Zetao Hu et al.

Transformer-based, pre-trained large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated outstanding performance across diverse domains, particularly in the emerging {\em pretrain-then-finetune} paradigm. Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA), a parameter-efficient fine-tuning method, is commonly used to adapt a base LLM to multiple downstream tasks. Further, LLM platforms enable developers to fine-tune multiple models and develop various domain-specific applications simultaneously. However, existing model parallelism schemes suffer from high communication overhead and inefficient GPU utilization when training multiple LoRA tasks across GPUs and machines. In this paper, we present mLoRA, a parallelism-efficient fine-tuning system designed for training multiple LoRA across GPUs and machines. mLoRA introduces a novel LoRA-aware pipeline parallelism scheme that efficiently pipelines independent LoRA adapters and their distinct fine-tuning stages across GPUs and machines, along with a new LoRA-efficient operator to enhance GPU utilization during pipelined LoRA training. Our extensive evaluation shows that mLoRA can significantly reduce average fine-tuning task completion time, e.g., by 30\%, compared to state-of-the-art methods like FSDP. More importantly, mLoRA enables simultaneous fine-tuning of larger models, e.g., two Llama-2-13B models on four NVIDIA RTX A6000 48GB GPUs, which is not feasible for FSDP due to high memory requirements. Hence, mLoRA not only increases fine-tuning efficiency but also makes it more accessible on cost-effective GPUs. mLoRA has been deployed in AntGroup's production environment.

Xinkai Zou, Xuan Jiang, Ruikai Huang et al.

Anomaly detection in cloud environments remains both critical and challenging. Existing context-level benchmarks typically focus on either metrics or logs and often lack reliable annotation, while most detection methods emphasize point anomalies within a single modality, overlooking contextual signals and limiting real-world applicability. Constructing a benchmark for context anomalies that combines metrics and logs is inherently difficult: reproducing anomalous scenarios on real servers is often infeasible or potentially harmful, while generating synthetic data introduces the additional challenge of maintaining cross-modal consistency. We introduce CloudAnoBench, a large-scale benchmark for context anomalies in cloud environments, comprising 28 anomalous scenarios and 16 deceptive normal scenarios, with 1,252 labeled cases and roughly 200,000 log and metric entries. Compared with prior benchmarks, CloudAnoBench exhibits higher ambiguity and greater difficulty, on which both prior machine learning methods and vanilla LLM prompting perform poorly. To demonstrate its utility, we further propose CloudAnoAgent, an LLM-based agent enhanced by symbolic verification that integrates metrics and logs. This agent system achieves substantial improvements in both anomaly detection and scenario identification on CloudAnoBench, and shows strong generalization to existing datasets. Together, CloudAnoBench and CloudAnoAgent lay the groundwork for advancing context-aware anomaly detection in cloud systems. Project Page: https://jayzou3773.github.io/cloudanobench-agent/

Xiaoda Wang, Yuan Tang, Tengda Guo et al.

Machine Learning (ML) has become ubiquitous, fueling data-driven applications across various organizations. Contrary to the traditional perception of ML in research, ML workflows can be complex, resource-intensive, and time-consuming. Expanding an ML workflow to encompass a wider range of data infrastructure and data types may lead to larger workloads and increased deployment costs. Currently, numerous workflow engines are available (with over ten being widely recognized). This variety poses a challenge for end-users in terms of mastering different engine APIs. While efforts have primarily focused on optimizing ML Operations (MLOps) for a specific workflow engine, current methods largely overlook workflow optimization across different engines. In this work, we design and implement Couler, a system designed for unified ML workflow optimization in the cloud. Our main insight lies in the ability to generate an ML workflow using natural language (NL) descriptions. We integrate Large Language Models (LLMs) into workflow generation, and provide a unified programming interface for various workflow engines. This approach alleviates the need to understand various workflow engines' APIs. Moreover, Couler enhances workflow computation efficiency by introducing automated caching at multiple stages, enabling large workflow auto-parallelization and automatic hyperparameters tuning. These enhancements minimize redundant computational costs and improve fault tolerance during deep learning workflow training. Couler is extensively deployed in real-world production scenarios at Ant Group, handling approximately 22k workflows daily, and has successfully improved the CPU/Memory utilization by more than 15% and the workflow completion rate by around 17%.