Diffusion Transformers have emerged as the preeminent models for a wide array of generative tasks, demonstrating superior performance and efficacy across various applications. The promising results come at the cost of slow inference, as each denoising step requires running the whole transformer model with a large amount of parameters. In this paper, we show that performing the full computation of the model at each diffusion step is unnecessary, as some computations can be skipped by lazily reusing the results of previous steps. Furthermore, we show that the lower bound of similarity between outputs at consecutive steps is notably high, and this similarity can be linearly approximated using the inputs. To verify our demonstrations, we propose the **LazyDiT**, a lazy learning framework that efficiently leverages cached results from earlier steps to skip redundant computations. Specifically, we incorporate lazy learning layers into the model, effectively trained to maximize laziness, enabling dynamic skipping of redundant computations. Experimental results show that LazyDiT outperforms the DDIM sampler across multiple diffusion transformer models at various resolutions. Furthermore, we implement our method on mobile devices, achieving better performance than DDIM with similar latency.

A growing trend has emerged in designing high-quality Small Language Models (SLMs) with a few million parameters. This trend is driven by the increasing concerns over cloud costs, privacy, and latency. Considering that full parameter training is feasible for SLMs on mobile devices, Quantization-Aware Training (QAT) is employed to improve efficiency by reducing computational overhead and memory footprint. However, previous QAT works adopt fine-grained quantization methods to compress models with billions of parameters on GPUs, incompatible with current commodity hardware, such as mobile and edge devices, which relies on Single Instruction Multiple Data (SIMD) instructions. Thus, the generalization of these methods to SLMs on mobile devices is limited. In this paper, we propose Squat method, an effective QAT framework with deployable quantization for SLMs on mobile devices. Specifically, we propose entropy-guided and distribution-aligned distillation to mitigate the distortion of attention information from quantization. Besides, we employ sub-8-bit token adaptive quantization, assigning varying bit widths to different tokens based on their importance. Furthermore, we develop a SIMD-based Multi-Kernel Mixed-Precision (MKMP) multiplier to support sub-8-bit mixed-precision MAC on mobile devices. Our extensive experiments verify the substantial improvements of our method compared to other QAT methods across various datasets. Furthermore, we achieve an on-device speedup of up to 2.37× compared with its FP16 counterparts, signaling a great advancement. Code: https://github.com/shawnricecake/squant

Transformer models have been widely investigated in different domains by providing long-range dependency handling and global contextual awareness, driving the development of popular AI applications such as ChatGPT, Gemini, and Alexa. State Space Models (SSMs) have emerged as strong contenders in the field of sequential modeling, challenging the dominance of Transformers. SSMs incorporate a selective mechanism that allows for dynamic parameter adjustment based on input data, enhancing their performance. However, this mechanism also comes with increasing computational complexity and bandwidth demands, posing challenges for deployment on resource-constraint mobile devices. To address these challenges without sacrificing the accuracy of the selective mechanism, we propose a sparse learning framework that integrates architecture-aware compiler optimizations. We introduce an end-to-end solution--$\mathbf{C}_4^n$ kernel sparsity, which prunes $n$ elements from every four contiguous weights, and develop a compiler-based acceleration solution to ensure execution efficiency for this sparsity on mobile devices. Based on the kernel sparsity, our framework generates optimized sparse models targeting specific sparsity or latency requirements for various model sizes. We further leverage pruned weights to compensate for the remaining weights, enhancing downstream task performance. For practical hardware acceleration, we propose $\mathbf{C}_4^n$-specific optimizations combined with a layout transformation elimination strategy. This approach mitigates inefficiencies arising from fine-grained pruning in linear layers and improves performance across other operations. Experimental results demonstrate that our method achieves superior task performance compared to other semi-structured pruning methods and achieves up-to 7$\times$ speedup compared to llama.cpp framework on mobile devices.

Real‐world datasets usually contain multiple attributes, making it essential to ensure fairness across all of them simultaneously. However, different attributes may vary in difficulty, and no existing approaches have effectively addressed this issue. Consequently, an attribute‐adaptive strategy is needed to achieve fairness for all attributes. Multi‐task Learning (MTL) leverages shared information to optimize multiple tasks concurrently, while Sparsely‐Gated Mixture‐of‐Experts (SMoE) can dynamically allocate computational resources to the most needed tasks. In this work, we formulate multi‐attribute fairness issue as an MTL problem and employ SMoE to achieve desirable performance across all attributes simultaneously. We first analyze the feasibility and find the potentiality by formalizing multi-attribute fairness problem into a MTL problem and mitigating it by using SMoE. However, vanilla SMoE could lead to over-utilization problem which causes sub-optimal performance. We then proposed an innovative SMoE framework for multi-attribute fair image classification, which further improves multi-attribute fairness by redesigning the MoE layer and routing policy with fairness consideration. Extensive experiments demonstrated the effectiveness. Taking a DeiT-Small as the backbone, we achieve 77.25% and 86.01% accuracy on the ISIC2019 and CelebA dataset respectively with Multi-attribute Predictive Quality Disparity (PQD) score of 0.801 and 0.787, beating current state-of-the-art methods Muffin, InfoFair and MultiFair.

Numerous adversarial attack methods have been developed to generate imperceptible image perturbations that cause erroneous predictions in state-of-the-art machine learning (ML) models, particularly deep neural networks (DNNs). Despite extensive research on adversarial examples, limited efforts have been made to explore the hidden characteristics carried by these perturbations. In this study, we investigate the feasibility of deducing information about the victim model (VM)—specifically, characteristics such as architecture type, kernel size, activation function, and weight sparsity—from adversarial examples. We approach this problem as a supervised learning task, where we aim to attribute categories of VM characteristics to individual adversarial examples. To facilitate this, we have assembled a dataset of adversarial attacks spanning seven types, generated from 135 victim models systematically varied across five architecture types, three kernel size configurations, three activation functions, and three levels of weight sparsity. We demonstrate that a supervised model parsing network (MPN) can effectively extract concealed details of the VM from adversarial examples. We also validate the practicality of this approach by evaluating the effects of various factors on parsing performance, such as different input formats and generalization to out-of-distribution cases. Furthermore, we highlight the connection between model parsing and attack transferability by showing how the MPN can uncover VM attributes in transfer attacks.

Two-stage object detectors exhibit high accuracy and precise localization, especially for identifying small objects that are favorable for various edge applications. However, the high computation costs associated with two-stage detection methods cause more severe thermal issues on edge devices, incurring dynamic runtime frequency change and thus large inference latency variations. Furthermore, the dynamic number of proposals in different frames leads to various computations over time, resulting in further latency variations. The significant latency variations of detectors on edge devices can harm user experience and waste hardware resources. To avoid thermal throttling and provide stable inference speed, we propose Lotus, a novel framework that is tailored for two-stage detectors to dynamically scale CPU and GPU frequencies jointly in an online manner based on deep reinforcement learning (DRL). To demonstrate the effectiveness of Lotus, we implement it on NVIDIA Jetson Orin Nano and Mi 11 Lite mobile platforms. The results indicate that Lotus can consistently and significantly reduce latency variation, achieve faster inference, and maintain lower CPU and GPU temperatures under various settings. Our code is available at [link].

Recent advancements in State Space Models (SSMs) have attracted significant interest, particularly in models optimized for parallel training and handling long-range dependencies.Architectures like Mamba have scaled to billions of parameters with selective SSM.To facilitate broader applications using Mamba, exploring its efficiency is crucial.While token reduction techniques offer a straightforward post-training strategy, we find that applying existing methods directly to SSMs leads to substantial performance drops.Through insightful analysis, we identify the reasons for this failure and the limitations of current techniques.In response, we propose a tailored, unified post-training token reduction method for SSMs.Our approach integrates token importance and similarity, thus taking advantage of both pruning and merging, to devise a fine-grained intra-layer token reduction strategy.Extensive experiments show that our method improves the average accuracy by 5.7% to 13.1% on six benchmarks with Mamba-2 compared to existing methods, while significantly reducing computational demands and memory requirements.1

One highly promising direction for enabling flexible real-time on-device image editing is utilizing data distillation by leveraging large-scale text-to-image diffusion models to generate paired datasets used for training generative adversarial networks (GANs). This approach notably alleviates the stringent requirements typically imposed by high-end commercial GPUs for performing image editing with diffusion models. However, unlike text-to-image diffusion models, each distilled GAN is specialized for a specific image editing task, necessitating costly training efforts to obtain models for various concepts. In this work, we introduce and address a novel research direction: can the process of distilling GANs from diffusion models be made significantly more efficient? To achieve this goal, we propose a series of innovative techniques. First, we construct a base GAN model with generalized features, adaptable to different concepts through fine-tuning, eliminating the need for training from scratch. Second, we identify crucial layers within the base GAN model and employ Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) with a simple yet effective rank search process, rather than fine-tuning the entire base model. Third, we investigate the minimal amount of data necessary for fine-tuning, further reducing the overall training time. Extensive experiments show that we can efficiently empower GANs with the ability to perform real-time high-quality image editing on mobile devices with remarkably reduced training and storage costs for each concept.

State Space Models (SSMs) have the advantage of keeping linear computational complexity compared to attention modules in transformers, and have been applied to vision tasks as a new type of powerful vision foundation model. Inspired by the observations that the final prediction in vision transformers (ViTs) is only based on a subset of most informative tokens, we take the novel step of enhancing the efficiency of SSM-based vision models through token-based pruning. However, direct applications of existing token pruning techniques designed for ViTs fail to deliver good performance, even with extensive fine-tuning. To address this issue, we revisit the unique computational characteristics of SSMs and discover that naive application disrupts the sequential token positions. This insight motivates us to design a novel and general token pruning method specifically for SSM-based vision models. We first introduce a pruning-aware hidden state alignment method to stabilize the neighborhood of remaining tokens for performance enhancement. Besides, based on our detailed analysis, we propose a token importance evaluation method adapted for SSM models, to guide the token pruning. With efficient implementation and practical acceleration methods, our method brings actual speedup. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach can achieve significant computation reduction with minimal impact on performance across different tasks. Notably, we achieve 81.7\% accuracy on ImageNet with a 41.6\% reduction in the FLOPs for pruned PlainMamba-L3. Furthermore, our work provides deeper insights into understanding the behavior of SSM-based vision models for future research.

The rapid progress in artificial intelligence-generated content (AIGC), especially with diffusion models, has significantly advanced development of high-quality video generation. However, current video diffusion models exhibit demanding computational requirements and high peak memory usage, especially for generating longer and higher-resolution videos. These limitations greatly hinder the practical application of video diffusion models on standard hardware platforms. To tackle this issue, we present a novel, training-free framework named Streamlined Inference, which leverages the temporal and spatial properties of video diffusion models. Our approach integrates three core components: Feature Slicer, Operator Grouping, and Step Rehash. Specifically, Feature Slicer effectively partitions input features into sub-features and Operator Grouping processes each sub-feature with a group of consecutive operators, resulting in significant memory reduction without sacrificing the quality or speed. Step Rehash further exploits the similarity between adjacent steps in diffusion, and accelerates inference through skipping unnecessary steps. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach significantly reduces peak memory and computational overhead, making it feasible to generate high-quality videos on a single consumer GPU (e.g., reducing peak memory of Animatediff from 42GB to 11GB, featuring faster inference on 2080Ti).

Large Language Models (LLMs) have long held sway in the realms of artificial intelligence research. Numerous efficient techniques, including weight pruning, quantization, and distillation, have been embraced to compress LLMs, targeting memory reduction and inference acceleration, which underscore the redundancy in LLMs. However, most model compression techniques concentrate on weight optimization, overlooking the exploration of optimal architectures. Besides, traditional architecture search methods, limited by the elevated complexity with extensive parameters, struggle to demonstrate their effectiveness on LLMs. In this paper, we propose a training-free architecture search framework to identify optimal subnets that preserve the fundamental strengths of the original LLMs while achieving inference acceleration. Furthermore, after generating subnets that inherit specific weights from the original LLMs, we introduce a reformation algorithm that utilizes the omitted weights to rectify the inherited weights with a small amount of calibration data. Compared with SOTA training-free structured pruning works that can generate smaller networks, our method demonstrates superior performance across standard benchmarks. Furthermore, our generated subnets can directly reduce the usage of GPU memory and achieve inference acceleration.

With the popularity of battery-powered edge computing, an important yet under-explored problem is the supporting of DNNs for diverse edge devices. On the one hand, different edge platforms have various runtime requirements and computation/memory capabilities. Deploying the same DNN model is unsatisfiable, while designing a specialized DNN for each platform is prohibitively expensive. On the other hand, for a single edge device, DVFS is leveraged to prolong the battery, incurring significant inference speed variation for the same DNN and consequently poor user experience. To tackle this, we propose Condense, a framework providing a single adaptive model that can be reconfigured (switch to various sub-networks with different computations/parameters) instantly for diverse devices and execution frequencies without any retraining. Experiments demonstrate that Condense can simultaneously provide vast high-accuracy sub-networks with different computations and parameters corresponding to various sparsity ratios to support diverse edge devices with different runtime requirements, and reduce the speed variation under varying frequencies on each device, with a memory cost of only one set of weights.

With the emergence of DNN applications on mobile devices, plenty of attention has been attracted to their optimization. However, the impact of DNN inference tasks on device power consumption is still a lack of comprehensive study. In this work, we propose MOC, a Multi-Objective deep reinforcement learning-assisted DNN inference stage-adaptive CPU-GPU Co-optimization approach. We find through experiments that CPU-GPU parameters, including CPU core, CPU, and GPU frequency, could significantly impact the speed and power consumption of DNN inference. We empirically analyze various stages of DNN inference, including pre/post-processing and feed-forward calculating stages. Based on the analysis, a DNN demand-resource matching model is proposed to classify the DNNs into various categories. Next, a multi-objective deep reinforcement learning (MODRL)-assisted framework is proposed, which considers both the DNN type and hardware environment, to make decisions on DNN inference stage-adaptive CPU/GPU parameter tuning. Finally, a rule-based action refinement technique is introduced to tailor the search space of MOC. Extensive experiments show that, compared with existing works, MOC could substantially reduce the power consumption of DNN inference tasks by up to 74.4%, meanwhile delivering an excellent speed on mobile devices.

Rehearsal-based approaches are a mainstay of continual learning (CL). They mitigate the catastrophic forgetting problem by maintaining a small fixed-size buffer with a subset of data from past tasks. While most rehearsal-based approaches exploit the knowledge from buffered past data, little attention is paid to inter-task relationships and to critical task-specific and task-invariant knowledge. By appropriately leveraging inter-task relationships, we propose a novel CL method, named DualHSIC, to boost the performance of existing rehearsal-based methods in a simple yet effective way. DualHSIC consists of two complementary components that stem from the so-called Hilbert Schmidt independence criterion (HSIC): HSIC-Bottleneck for Rehearsal (HBR) lessens the inter-task interference and HSIC Alignment (HA) promotes task-invariant knowledge sharing. Extensive experiments show that DualHSIC can be seamlessly plugged into existing rehearsal-based methods for consistent performance improvements, outperforming recent state-of-the-art regularization-enhanced rehearsal methods.

The bird's-eye-view (BEV) perception plays a critical role in autonomous driving systems, involving the accurate and efficient detection and tracking of objects from a top-down perspective. To achieve real-time decision-making in self-driving scenarios, low-latency computation is essential. While recent approaches to BEV detection have focused on improving detection precision using Lift-Splat-Shoot (LSS)-based or transformer-based schemas, the substantial computational and memory burden of these approaches increases the risk of system crashes when multiple on-vehicle tasks run simultaneously. Unfortunately, there is a dearth of literature on efficient BEV detector paradigms, let alone achieving realistic speedups. Unlike existing works that focus on reducing computation costs, this paper focuses on developing an efficient model design that prioritizes actual on-device latency. To achieve this goal, we propose a latency-aware design methodology that considers key hardware properties, such as memory access cost and degree of parallelism. Given the prevalence of GPUs as the main computation platform for autonomous driving systems, we develop a theoretical latency prediction model and introduce efficient building operators. By leveraging these operators and following an effective local-to-global visual modeling process, we propose a hardware-oriented backbone that is also optimized for strong feature capturing and fusing. Using these insights, we present a new hardware-oriented framework for efficient yet accurate camera-view BEV detectors. Experiments show that HotBEV achieves a 2\%$\sim$23\% NDS gain, and 2\%$\sim$7.8\% mAP gain with a 1.1$\times$$\sim$3.4$\times$ speedups compared to existing works on V100; On multiple GPU devices such as GPU GTX 2080 and the low-end GTX 1080, HotBEV achieves 1.1$\times$$\sim$6.3$\times$ faster than others.

During the deployment of deep neural networks (DNNs) on edge devices, many research efforts are devoted to the limited hardware resource. However, little attention is paid to the influence of dynamic power management. As edge devices typically only have a budget of energy with batteries (rather than almost unlimited energy support on servers or workstations), their dynamic power management often changes the execution frequency as in the widely-used dynamic voltage and frequency scaling (DVFS) technique. This leads to highly unstable inference speed performance, especially for computation-intensive DNN models, which can harm user experience and waste hardware resources. We firstly identify this problem and then propose All-in-One, a highly representative pruning framework to work with dynamic power management using DVFS. The framework can use only one set of model weights and soft masks (together with other auxiliary parameters of negligible storage) to represent multiple models of various pruning ratios. By re-configuring the model to the corresponding pruning ratio for a specific execution frequency (and voltage), we are able to achieve stable inference speed, i.e., keeping the difference in speed performance under various execution frequencies as small as possible. Our experiments demonstrate that our method not only achieves high accuracy for multiple models of different pruning ratios, but also reduces their variance of inference latency for various frequencies, with minimal memory consumption of only one model and one soft mask.

Existing work in continual learning (CL) focuses on mitigating catastrophic forgetting, i.e., model performance deterioration on past tasks when learning a new task. However, the training efficiency of a CL system is under-investigated, which limits the real-world application of CL systems under resource-limited scenarios. In this work, we propose a novel framework called Sparse Continual Learning (SparCL), which is the first study that leverages sparsity to enable cost-effective continual learning on edge devices. SparCL achieves both training acceleration and accuracy preservation through the synergy of three aspects: weight sparsity, data efficiency, and gradient sparsity. Specifically, we propose task-aware dynamic masking (TDM) to learn a sparse network throughout the entire CL process, dynamic data removal (DDR) to remove less informative training data, and dynamic gradient masking (DGM) to sparsify the gradient updates. Each of them not only improves efficiency, but also further mitigates catastrophic forgetting. SparCL consistently improves the training efficiency of existing state-of-the-art (SOTA) CL methods by at most 23X less training FLOPs, and, surprisingly, further improves the SOTA accuracy by at most 1.7%. SparCL also outperforms competitive baselines obtained from adapting SOTA sparse training methods to the CL setting in both efficiency and accuracy. We also evaluate the effectiveness of SparCL on a real mobile phone, further indicating the practical potential of our method.

Deep learning methods have been very successful at radio frequency fingerprinting tasks, predicting the identity of transmitting devices with high accuracy. We study radio frequency fingerprinting deployments at resource-constrained edge devices. We use structured pruning to jointly train and sparsify neural networks tailored to edge hardware implementations. We compress convolutional layers by a$27.2\times$factor while incurring a negligible prediction accuracy decrease (less than 1 percent). We demonstrate the efficacy of our approach over multiple edge hardware platforms, including a Samsung Gallaxy S10 phone and a Xilinx-ZCU104 FPGA. Our method yields significant inference speedups,$11.5\times$on the FPGA and$3\times$on the smartphone, as well as high efficiency: the FPGA processing time is$17\times$smaller than in a V100 GPU. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to explore the possibility of compressing networks for radio frequency fingerprinting; as such, our experiments can be seen as a means of characterizing the informational capacity associated with this specific learning task.

Weight pruning is an effective model compression technique to tackle the challenges of achieving real-time deep neural network (DNN) inference on mobile devices. However, prior pruning schemes have limited application scenarios due to accuracy degradation, difficulty in leveraging hardware acceleration, and/or restriction on certain types of DNN layers. In this article, we propose a general, fine-grained structured pruning scheme and corresponding compiler optimizations that are applicable to any type of DNN layer while achieving high accuracy and hardware inference performance. With the flexibility of applying different pruning schemes to different layers enabled by our compiler optimizations, we further probe into the new problem of determining the best-suited pruning scheme considering the different acceleration and accuracy performance of various pruning schemes. Two pruning scheme mapping methods—one -search based and the other is rule based—are proposed to automatically derive the best-suited pruning regularity and block size for each layer of any given DNN. Experimental results demonstrate that our pruning scheme mapping methods, together with the general fine-grained structured pruning scheme, outperform the state-of-the-art DNN optimization framework with up to 2.48 \( \times \) and 1.73 \( \times \) DNN inference acceleration on CIFAR-10 and ImageNet datasets without accuracy loss.

Though recent years have witnessed remarkable progress in single image super-resolution (SISR) tasks with the prosperous development of deep neural networks (DNNs), the deep learning methods are confronted with the computation and memory consumption issues in practice, especially for resource-limited platforms such as mobile devices. To overcome the challenge and facilitate the real-time deployment of SISR tasks on mobile, we combine neural architecture search with pruning search and propose an automatic search framework that derives sparse super-resolution (SR) models with high image quality while satisfying the real-time inference requirement. To decrease the search cost, we leverage the weight sharing strategy by introducing a supernet and decouple the search problem into three stages, including supernet construction, compiler-aware architecture and pruning search, and compiler-aware pruning ratio search. With the proposed framework, we are the first to achieve real-time SR inference (with only tens of milliseconds per frame) for implementing 720p resolution with competitive image quality (in terms of PSNR and SSIM) on mobile platforms (Samsung Galaxy S20).

Recently, a new trend of exploring sparsity for accelerating neural network training has emerged, embracing the paradigm of training on the edge. This paper proposes a novel Memory-Economic Sparse Training (MEST) framework targeting for accurate and fast execution on edge devices. The proposed MEST framework consists of enhancements by Elastic Mutation (EM) and Soft Memory Bound (&S) that ensure superior accuracy at high sparsity ratios. Different from the existing works for sparse training, this current work reveals the importance of sparsity schemes on the performance of sparse training in terms of accuracy as well as training speed on real edge devices. On top of that, the paper proposes to employ data efficiency for further acceleration of sparse training. Our results suggest that unforgettable examples can be identified in-situ even during the dynamic exploration of sparsity masks in the sparse training process, and therefore can be removed for further training speedup on edge devices. Comparing with state-of-the-art (SOTA) works on accuracy, our MEST increases Top-1 accuracy significantly on ImageNet when using the same unstructured sparsity scheme. Systematical evaluation on accuracy, training speed, and memory footprint are conducted, where the proposed MEST framework consistently outperforms representative SOTA works. A reviewer strongly against our work based on his false assumptions and misunderstandings. On top of the previous submission, we employ data efficiency for further acceleration of sparse training. And we explore the impact of model sparsity, sparsity schemes, and sparse training algorithms on the number of removable training examples. Our codes are publicly available at: https://github.com/boone891214/MEST.

Recurrent neural networks (RNNs) based automatic speech recognition has nowadays become promising and important on mobile devices such as smart phones. However, previous RNN compression techniques either suffer from hardware performance overhead due to irregularity or significant accuracy loss due to the preserved regularity for hardware friendliness. In this work, we propose RTMobile that leverages both a novel block-based pruning approach and compiler optimizations to accelerate RNN inference on mobile devices. Our proposed RTMobile is the first work that can achieve real-time RNN inference on mobile platforms. Experimental results demonstrate that RTMobile can significantly outperform existing RNN hardware acceleration methods in terms of both inference accuracy and time. Compared with prior work on FPGA, RTMobile using Adreno 640 embedded GPU on GRU can improve the energy-efficiency by 40× while maintaining the same inference time.

Weight pruning of deep neural networks (DNNs) has been proposed to satisfy the limited storage and computing capability of mobile edge devices. However, previous pruning methods mainly focus on reducing the model size and/or improving performance without considering the privacy of user data. To mitigate this concern, we propose a privacy-preserving-oriented pruning and mobile acceleration framework that does not require the private training dataset. At the algorithm level of the proposed framework, a systematic weight pruning technique based on the alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) is designed to iteratively solve the pattern-based pruning problem for each layer with randomly generated synthetic data. In addition, corresponding optimizations at the compiler level are leveraged for inference accelerations on devices. With the proposed framework, users could avoid the time-consuming pruning process for non-experts and directly benefit from compressed models. Experimental results show that the proposed framework outperforms three state-of-art end-to-end DNN frameworks, i.e., TensorFlow-Lite, TVM, and MNN, with speedup up to 4.2×, 2.5×, and 2.0×, respectively, with almost no accuracy loss, while preserving data privacy.

Large-scale machine learning (ML) models are routinely trained in a distributed fashion, due to their increasing complexity and data sizes. In a shared cluster handling multiple distributed learning workloads with a parameter server framework, it is important to determine the adequate number of concurrent workers and parameter servers for each ML workload over time, in order to minimize the average completion time and increase resource utilization. Existing schedulers for machine learning workloads involve meticulously designed heuristics. However, as the execution environment is highly complex and dynamic, it is challenging to construct an accurate model to make online decisions. In this paper, we design an experience-driven approach that learns to manage the cluster directly from experience rather than using a mathematical model. We propose Chic, a scheduler that is tailored for scheduling machine learning workloads in a cluster by leveraging deep reinforcement learning techniques. With our design of the state space, action space, and reward function, Chic trains a deep neural network with a modified version of the cross-entropy method to approximate the policy for assigning workers and parameter servers for future workloads based on the experience of the agent. Furthermore, a simplified version named Chic-Pair with a shorter training time for the policy is purposed by assigning workers and parameter servers in a pair. We compare Chic and Pair with state-of-the-art heuristics, and our results show that Chic and Chic-Pair are able to reduce the average training time significantly for machine learning workloads under a wide variety of conditions.