Wang Wang

Haoru Tan, Sitong Wu, Xiuzhe Wu et al. · stanford

Data plays a pivotal role in the groundbreaking advancements in artificial intelligence. The quantitative analysis of data significantly contributes to model training, enhancing both the efficiency and quality of data utilization. However, existing data analysis tools often lag in accuracy. For instance, many of these tools even assume that the loss function of neural networks is convex. These limitations make it challenging to implement current methods effectively. In this paper, we introduce a new formulation to approximate a sample's influence by accumulating the differences in influence between consecutive learning steps, which we term Diff-In. Specifically, we formulate the sample-wise influence as the cumulative sum of its changes/differences across successive training iterations. By employing second-order approximations, we approximate these difference terms with high accuracy while eliminating the need for model convexity required by existing methods. Despite being a second-order method, Diff-In maintains computational complexity comparable to that of first-order methods and remains scalable. This efficiency is achieved by computing the product of the Hessian and gradient, which can be efficiently approximated using finite differences of first-order gradients. We assess the approximation accuracy of Diff-In both theoretically and empirically. Our theoretical analysis demonstrates that Diff-In achieves significantly lower approximation error compared to existing influence estimators. Extensive experiments further confirm its superior performance across multiple benchmark datasets in three data-centric tasks: data cleaning, data deletion, and coreset selection. Notably, our experiments on data pruning for large-scale vision-language pre-training show that Diff-In can scale to millions of data points and outperforms strong baselines.

Jinrong Guo, Wantao Liu, Wang Wang et al.

Typically, Ultra-deep neural network(UDNN) tends to yield high-quality model, but its training process is usually resource intensive and time-consuming. Modern GPU's scarce DRAM capacity is the primary bottleneck that hinders the trainability and the training efficiency of UDNN. In this paper, we present "AccUDNN", an accelerator that aims to make the utmost use of finite GPU memory resources to speed up the training process of UDNN. AccUDNN mainly includes two modules: memory optimizer and hyperparameter tuner. Memory optimizer develops a performance-model guided dynamic swap out/in strategy, by offloading appropriate data to host memory, GPU memory footprint can be significantly slashed to overcome the restriction of trainability of UDNN. After applying the memory optimization strategy, hyperparameter tuner is designed to explore the efficiency-optimal minibatch size and the matched learning rate. Evaluations demonstrate that AccUDNN cuts down the GPU memory requirement of ResNet-152 from more than 24GB to 8GB. In turn, given 12GB GPU memory budget, the efficiency-optimal minibatch size can reach 4.2x larger than original Caffe. Benefiting from better utilization of single GPU's computing resources and fewer parameter synchronization of large minibatch size, 7.7x speed-up is achieved by 8 GPUs' cluster without any communication optimization and no accuracy losses.