We propose a novel technique for faster deep neural network training which systematically applies sample-based approximation to the constituent tensor operations, i.e., matrix multiplications and convolutions. We introduce new sampling techniques, study their theoretical properties, and prove that they provide the same convergence guarantees when applied to SGD training. We apply approximate tensor operations to single and multi-node training of MLP and CNN networks on MNIST, CIFAR-10 and ImageNet datasets. We demonstrate up to 66% reduction in the amount of computations and communication, and up to 1.37x faster training time while maintaining negligible or no impact on the final test accuracy.

We propose a novel technique for faster deep neural network training which systematically applies sample-based approximation to the constituent tensor operations, i.e., matrix multiplications and convolutions. We introduce new sampling techniques, study their theoretical properties, and prove that they provide the same convergence guarantees when applied to SGD training. We apply approximate tensor operations to single and multi-node training of MLP and CNN networks on MNIST, CIFAR-10 and ImageNet datasets. We demonstrate up to 66% reduction in the amount of computations and communication, and up to 1.37x faster training time while maintaining negligible or no impact on the final test accuracy.

Abstract: In the twilight of Moore's law, GPUs and other specialized hardware accelerators have dramatically sped up neural network training. However, earlier stages of the training pipeline, such as disk I/O and data preprocessing, do not run on accelerators. As accelerators continue to improve, these earlier stages will increasingly become the bottleneck. In this paper, we introduce "data echoing," which reduces the total computation used by earlier pipeline stages and speeds up training whenever computation upstream from accelerators dominates the training time. Data echoing reuses (or "echoes") intermediate outputs from earlier pipeline stages in order to reclaim idle capacity.