{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/auto-precision-scaling-for-distributed-deep","title":"Auto-Precision Scaling for Distributed Deep Learning","arxiv_id":"1911.08907","date":"2019-11-20","proceeding":null,"authors":["Ruobing Han","James Demmel","Yang You"],"abstract":"It has been reported that the communication cost for synchronizing gradients can be a bottleneck, which limits the scalability of distributed deep learning. Using low-precision gradients is a promising technique for reducing the bandwidth requirement. In this work, we propose Auto Precision Scaling (APS), an algorithm that can improve the accuracy when we communicate gradients by low-precision floating-point values. APS can improve the accuracy for all precisions with a trivial communication cost. Our experimental results show that for many applications, APS can train state-of-the-art models by 8-bit gradients with no or only a tiny accuracy loss (<0.05%). Furthermore, we can avoid any accuracy loss by designing a hybrid-precision technique. Finally, we propose a performance model to evaluate the proposed method. Our experimental results show that APS can get a significant speedup over state-of-the-art methods. To make it available to researchers and developers, we design and implement CPD (Customized-Precision Deep Learning) system, which can simulate the training process using an arbitrary low-precision customized floating-point format. We integrate CPD into PyTorch and make it open-source.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/1911.08907v3","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/1911.08907v3.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"auto-precision-scaling-for-distributed-deep","repo_url":"https://github.com/drcut/CPD","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":0,"framework":"pytorch","reach":null}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"deep-learning","task_name":"Deep Learning"},{"task_slug":"image-classification","task_name":"Image Classification"}],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":null,"mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}