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ALMAB-DC: Active Learning, Multi-Armed Bandits, and Distributed Computing for Sequential Experimental Design and Black-Box Optimization

Hui-Mean, Foo, Chang, Yuan-chin I

arXiv.org Machine Learning

Sequential experimental design under expensive, gradient-free objectives is a central challenge in computational statistics: evaluation budgets are tightly constrained and information must be extracted efficiently from each observation. We propose \textbf{ALMAB-DC}, a GP-based sequential design framework combining active learning, multi-armed bandits (MAB), and distributed asynchronous computing for expensive black-box experimentation. A Gaussian process surrogate with uncertainty-aware acquisition identifies informative query points; a UCB or Thompson-sampling bandit controller allocates evaluations across parallel workers; and an asynchronous scheduler handles heterogeneous runtimes. We present cumulative regret bounds for the bandit components and characterize parallel scalability via Amdahl's Law. We validate ALMAB-DC on five benchmarks. On the two statistical experimental-design tasks, ALMAB-DC achieves lower simple regret than Equal Spacing, Random, and D-optimal designs in dose--response optimization, and in adaptive spatial field estimation matches the Greedy Max-Variance benchmark while outperforming Latin Hypercube Sampling; at $K=4$ the distributed setting reaches target performance in one-quarter of sequential wall-clock rounds. On three ML/engineering tasks (CIFAR-10 HPO, CFD drag minimization, MuJoCo RL), ALMAB-DC achieves 93.4\% CIFAR-10 accuracy (outperforming BOHB by 1.7\,pp and Optuna by 1.1\,pp), reduces airfoil drag to $C_D = 0.059$ (36.9\% below Grid Search), and improves RL return by 50\% over Grid Search. All advantages over non-ALMAB baselines are statistically significant under Bonferroni-corrected Mann--Whitney $U$ tests. Distributed execution achieves $7.5\times$ speedup at $K = 16$ agents, consistent with Amdahl's Law.


Scaling DoRA: High-Rank Adaptation via Factored Norms and Fused Kernels

Zelenin, Alexandra, Zhuravlyova, Alexandra

arXiv.org Machine Learning

Weight-Decomposed Low-Rank Adaptation (DoRA) extends LoRA by decoupling weight magnitude from direction, but its forward pass requires the row-wise norm of W + sBA, a computation that every major framework we surveyed implements by materializing the dense [d_out, d_in] product BA. At d_in = 8192 and rank r = 384, a single module's norm requires about 512 MB of transient working memory in bf16, making high-rank DoRA costly and often infeasible on common single-GPU setups once hundreds of adapted modules and checkpointing are involved. We present two systems contributions. A factored norm decomposes the squared norm into base, cross, and Gram terms computable through O(d_out r + r^2) intermediates, eliminating the dense product. Fused Triton kernels collapse the four-kernel DoRA composition into a single pass, reducing memory traffic by about 4x and using a numerically stable form that avoids catastrophic cancellation in the near-unity rescaling regime where magnitude scales concentrate in practice. Across six 8-32B vision-language models (VLMs) on three NVIDIA GPUs (RTX 6000 PRO, H200, B200) at r = 384 in bf16, the fused implementation is 1.5-2.0x faster than Hugging Face PEFT's DoRA implementation for inference and 1.5-1.9x faster for gradient computation (optimizer step excluded), with up to 7 GB lower peak VRAM. Microbenchmarks on six GPUs spanning four architecture generations (L40S, A100, RTX 6000 PRO, H200, B200, B300) confirm 1.5-2.7x compose-kernel speedup. Final-logit cosine similarity exceeds 0.9999 across all model/GPU pairs, and multi-seed training curves match within 7.1 x 10^-4 mean per-step loss delta over 2000 steps.


Breaking the Nonsmooth Barrier: A Scalable Parallel Method for Composite Optimization

Neural Information Processing Systems

Due to their simplicity and excellent performance, parallel asynchronous variants of stochastic gradient descent have become popular methods to solve a wide range of large-scale optimization problems on multi-core architectures. Yet, despite their practical success, support for nonsmooth objectives is still lacking, making them unsuitable for many problems of interest in machine learning, such as the Lasso, group Lasso or empirical risk minimization with convex constraints. In this work, we propose and analyze ProxASAGA, a fully asynchronous sparse method inspired by SAGA, a variance reduced incremental gradient algorithm. The proposed method is easy to implement and significantly outperforms the state of the art on several nonsmooth, large-scale problems. We prove that our method achieves a theoretical linear speedup with respect to the sequential version under assumptions on the sparsity of gradients and block-separability of the proximal term. Empirical benchmarks on a multi-core architecture illustrate practical speedups of up to 12x on a 20-core machine.


Learning Structured Sparsity in Deep Neural Networks

Neural Information Processing Systems

High demand for computation resources severely hinders deployment of large-scale Deep Neural Networks (DNN) in resource constrained devices. In this work, we propose a Structured Sparsity Learning (SSL) method to regularize the structures (i.e., filters, channels, filter shapes, and layer depth) of DNNs. SSL can: (1) learn a compact structure from a bigger DNN to reduce computation cost; (2) obtain a hardware-friendly structured sparsity of DNN to efficiently accelerate the DNN's evaluation. Experimental results show that SSL achieves on average 5.1X and 3.1X speedups of convolutional layer computation of AlexNet against CPU and GPU, respectively, with off-the-shelf libraries. These speedups are about twice speedups of non-structured sparsity; (3) regularize the DNN structure to improve classification accuracy. The results show that for CIFAR-10, regularization on layer depth reduces a 20-layer Deep Residual Network (ResNet) to 18 layers while improves the accuracy from 91.25% to 92.60%, which is still higher than that of original ResNet with 32 layers.


TETRIS: TilE-matching the TRemendous Irregular Sparsity

Neural Information Processing Systems

Compressing neural networks by pruning weights with small magnitudes can significantly reduce the computation and storage cost. Although pruning makes the model smaller, it is difficult to get practical speedup in modern computing platforms such as CPU and GPU due to the irregularity. Structural pruning has attract a lot of research interest to make sparsity hardware-friendly. Increasing the sparsity granularity can lead to better hardware utilization, but it will compromise the sparsity for maintaining accuracy. In this work, we propose a novel method, TETRIS, to achieve both better hardware utilization and higher sparsity. Just like a tile-matching game, we cluster the irregularly distributed weights with small value into structured groups by reordering the input/output dimension and structurally prune them. Results show that it can achieve comparable sparsity with the irregular element-wise pruning and demonstrate negligible accuracy loss. The experiments also shows ideal speedup, which is proportional to the sparsity, on GPU platforms. Our proposed method provides a new solution toward algorithm and architecture co-optimization for accuracy-efficiency trade-off.