{"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/simigrad-fine-grained-adaptive-batching-for","title":"SimiGrad: Fine-Grained Adaptive Batching for Large Scale Training using Gradient Similarity Measurement","arxiv_id":null,"date":"2021-12-01","proceeding":"NeurIPS 2021 12","authors":["Heyang Qin","Samyam Rajbhandari","Olatunji Ruwase","Feng Yan","Lei Yang","Yuxiong He"],"abstract":"Large scale training requires massive parallelism to finish the training within a reasonable amount of time. To support massive parallelism, large batch training is the key enabler but often at the cost of generalization performance. Existing works explore adaptive batching or hand-tuned static large batching, in order to strike a balance between the computational efficiency and the performance. However, these methods can provide only coarse-grained adaption (e.g., at a epoch level) due to the intrinsic expensive calculation or hand tuning requirements. In this paper, we propose a fully automated and lightweight adaptive batching methodology to enable fine-grained batch size adaption (e.g., at a mini-batch level) that can achieve state-of-the-art performance with record breaking batch sizes. The core component of our method is a lightweight yet efficient representation of the critical gradient noise information. We open-source the proposed methodology by providing a plugin tool that supports mainstream machine learning frameworks. Extensive evaluations on popular benchmarks (e.g., CIFAR10, ImageNet, and BERT-Large) demonstrate that the proposed methodology outperforms state-of-the-art methodologies using adaptive batching approaches or hand-tuned static strategies in both performance and batch size. Particularly, we achieve a new state-of-the-art batch size of 78k in BERT-Large pretraining with SQuAD score 90.69 compared to 90.58 reported in previous state-of-the-art with 59k batch size.","url_abs":"http://proceedings.neurips.cc/paper/2021/hash/abea47ba24142ed16b7d8fbf2c740e0d-Abstract.html","url_pdf":"http://proceedings.neurips.cc/paper/2021/file/abea47ba24142ed16b7d8fbf2c740e0d-Paper.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":"simigrad-fine-grained-adaptive-batching-for","repo_url":"https://github.com/heyangqin/simigrad","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":0,"framework":"pytorch","reach":null}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"computational-efficiency","task_name":"Computational Efficiency"}],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"syntology_url":null,"atlas_url":null,"mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}