Placeto: Learning Generalizable Device Placement Algorithms for Distributed Machine Learning
This addresses the overhead of re-training for each new graph in distributed machine learning, offering a more scalable solution for practitioners.
The paper tackles the problem of finding efficient device placements for distributed neural network training by introducing Placeto, a reinforcement learning approach that learns generalizable policies applicable to any computation graph, achieving placements on par with or better than prior methods while requiring up to 6.1x fewer training steps.
We present Placeto, a reinforcement learning (RL) approach to efficiently find device placements for distributed neural network training. Unlike prior approaches that only find a device placement for a specific computation graph, Placeto can learn generalizable device placement policies that can be applied to any graph. We propose two key ideas in our approach: (1) we represent the policy as performing iterative placement improvements, rather than outputting a placement in one shot; (2) we use graph embeddings to capture relevant information about the structure of the computation graph, without relying on node labels for indexing. These ideas allow Placeto to train efficiently and generalize to unseen graphs. Our experiments show that Placeto requires up to 6.1x fewer training steps to find placements that are on par with or better than the best placements found by prior approaches. Moreover, Placeto is able to learn a generalizable placement policy for any given family of graphs, which can then be used without any retraining to predict optimized placements for unseen graphs from the same family. This eliminates the large overhead incurred by prior RL approaches whose lack of generalizability necessitates re-training from scratch every time a new graph is to be placed.