We present POTATO, the Portable text annotation tool, a free, fully open-sourced annotation system that 1) supports labeling many types of text and multimodal data; 2) offers easy-to-configure features to maximize the productivity of both deployers and annotators (convenient templates for common ML/NLP tasks, active learning, keypress shortcuts, keyword highlights, tooltips); and 3) supports a high degree of customization (editable UI, inserting pre-screening questions, attention and qualification tests). Experiments over two annotation tasks suggest that POTATO improves labeling speed through its specially-designed productivity features, especially for long documents and complex tasks. POTATO is available at https://github.com/davidjurgens/potato and will continue to be updated.

Distributed training techniques have been widely deployed in large-scale deep neural networks (DNNs) training on dense-GPU clusters. However, on public cloud clusters, due to the moderate inter-connection bandwidth between instances, traditional state-of-the-art distributed training systems cannot scale well in training large-scale models. In this paper, we propose a new computing and communication efficient top-k sparsification communication library for distributed training. To further improve the system scalability, we optimize I/O by proposing a simple yet efficient multi-level data caching mechanism and optimize the update operation by introducing a novel parallel tensor operator. Experimental results on a 16-node Tencent Cloud cluster (each node with 8 Nvidia Tesla V100 GPUs) show that our system achieves 25%-40% faster than existing state-of-the-art systems on CNNs and Transformer. We finally break the record on DAWNBench on training ResNet-50 to 93% top-5 accuracy on ImageNet.