Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) have demonstrated impressive performance on many machine-learning tasks such as image recognition and language modeling, and are becoming prevalent even on mobile platforms. Despite so, designing neural architectures still remains a manual, time-consuming process that requires profound domain knowledge. Recently, Parameter Tuning Servers have gathered the attention o industry and academia. Those systems allow users from all domains to automatically achieve the desired model accuracy for their applications. However, although the entire process of tuning and training models is performed solely to be deployed for inference, state-of-the-art approaches typically ignore system-oriented and inference-related objectives such as runtime, memory usage, and power consumption. This is a challenging problem: besides adding one more dimension to an already complex problem, the information about edge devices available to the user is rarely known or complete. To accommodate all these objectives together, it is crucial for tuning system to take a holistic approach to parameter tuning and consider all levels of parameters simultaneously into account. We present EdgeTune, a novel inference-aware parameter tuning server. It considers the tuning of parameters in all levels backed by an optimization function capturing multiple objectives. Our approach relies on inference estimated metrics collected from our emulation server running asynchronously from the main tuning process. The latter can then leverage the inference performance while still tuning the model. We propose a novel one-fold tuning algorithm that employs the principle of multi-fidelity and simultaneously explores multiple tuning budgets, which the prior art can only handle as suboptimal case of single type of budget. EdgeTune outputs inference recommendations to the user while improving tuning time and energy by at least 18\% and 53\% when compared to the baseline.

DNN learning jobs are common in today's clusters due to the advances in AI driven services such as machine translation and image recognition. The most critical phase of these jobs for model performance and learning cost is the tuning of hyperparameters. Existing approaches make use of techniques such as early stopping criteria to reduce the tuning impact on learning cost. However, these strategies do not consider the impact that certain hyperparameters and systems parameters have on training time. This paper presents PIPETUNE, a framework for DNN learning jobs that addresses the trade-offs between these two types of parameters. PIPETUNE takes advantage of the high parallelism and recurring characteristics of such jobs to minimize the learning cost via a pipelined simultaneous tuning of both hyper and system parameters. Our experimental evaluation using three different types of workloads indicates that PIPETUNE achieves up to 22.6% reduction and 1.7× speed up on tuning and training time, respectively. PipeTune not only improves performance but also lowers energy consumption up to 29%.

Today’s big data clusters based on the MapReduce paradigm are capable of executing analysis jobs with multiple priorities, providing differential latency guarantees. Traces from production systems show that the latency advantage of high-priority jobs comes at the cost of severe latency degradation of low-priority jobs as well as daunting resource waste caused by repetitive eviction and re-execution of low-priority jobs. We advocate a new resource management design that exploits the idea of differential approximation and sprinting. The unique combination of approximation and sprinting avoids the eviction of low-priority jobs and its consequent latency degradation and resource waste. To this end, we designed, implemented and evaluated DiAS, an extension of the Spark processing engine to support deflate jobs by dropping tasks and to sprint jobs. Our experiments on scenarios with two and three priority classes indicate that DiAS achieves up to 90% and 60% latency reduction for low- and high-priority jobs, respectively. DiAS not only eliminates resource waste but also (surprisingly) lowers energy consumption up to 30% at only a marginal accuracy loss for low-priority jobs.

Data is generated with unprecedented speed, due to the flourishing of social media and open platforms. However, due to the lack of scrutinizing, both clean and dirty data are widely spreaded. For instance, there is a significant portion of images tagged with corrupted dirty class labels. Such dirty data sets are not only detrimental to the learning outcomes, e.g., misclassified images into the wrong classes, but also costly. It is pointed out that bad data can cost the U.S. up to a daunting 3 trillion dollars per year. In this paper, we address the following question: how prevailing (deep) machine learning models can be robustly trained given a non-negligible presence of corrupted labeled data. Dirty labels significantly increase the complexity of existing learning problems, as the ground truth of label's quality are not easily assessed. Here, we advocate to rigorously incorporate human experts into one learning framework where both artificial and human intelligence collaborate. To such an end, we combine three strategies to enhance the robustness for deep and regular machine learning algorithms, namely, (i) data filtering through additional quality model, (ii) data selection via actively learning from expert, and (iii) imitating expert's correction process. We demonstrate three strategies sequentially with examples and apply them on widely used benchmarks, such as CIFAR10 and CIFAR100. Our initial results show the effectiveness of the proposed strategies in combating dirty labels, e.g., the resulting classification can be up to 50% higher than the state-of-the-art AI-only solutions. Finally, we extend the discussion of robust learning from the trusted data to the trusted execution environment.

LEGaTO is a three-year EU H2020 project which started in December 2017. The LEGaTO project will leverage task-based programming models to provide a software ecosystem for Madein- Europe heterogeneous hardware composed of CPUs, GPUs, FPGAs and dataflow engines. The aim is to attain one order of magnitude energy savings from the edge to the converged cloud/HPC.