Background: Distributed training is essential for large scale training of deep neural networks (DNNs). The dominant methods for large scale DNN training are synchronous (e.g. All-Reduce), but these require waiting for all workers in each step. Thus, these methods are limited by the delays caused by straggling workers. Results: We study a typical scenario in which workers are straggling due to variability in compute time. We find an analytical relation between compute time properties and scalability limitations, caused by such straggling workers. With these findings, we propose a simple yet effective decentralized method to reduce the variation among workers and thus improve the robustness of synchronous training. This method can be integrated with the widely used All-Reduce. Our findings are validated on large-scale training tasks using 200 Gaudi Accelerators.

Neural network quantization methods often involve simulating the quantization process during training, making the trained model highly dependent on the target bit-width and precise way quantization is performed. Robust quantization offers an alternative approach with improved tolerance to different classes of data-types and quantization policies. It opens up new exciting applications where the quantization process is not static and can vary to meet different circumstances and implementations. To address this issue, we propose a method that provides intrinsic robustness to the model against a broad range of quantization processes. Our method is motivated by theoretical arguments and enables us to store a single generic model capable of operating at various bit-widths and quantization policies. We validate our method's effectiveness on different ImageNet Models. A reference implementation accompanies the paper.