Accelerating Neural Network Training: An Analysis of the AlgoPerf Competition

The goal of the AlgoPerf: Training Algorithms competition is to evaluate practical speed-ups in neural network training achieved solely by improving the underlying training algorithms. In the external tuning ruleset, submissions must provide workload-agnostic hyperparameter search spaces, while in the self-tuning ruleset they must be completely hyperparameter-free. In both rulesets, submissions are compared on time-to-result across multiple deep learning workloads, training on fixed hardware. This paper presents the inaugural AlgoPerf competition's results, which drew 18 diverse submissions from 10 teams. Our investigation reveals several key findings: (1) The winning submission in the external tuning ruleset, using Distributed Shampoo, demonstrates the effectiveness of non-diagonal preconditioning over popular methods like Adam, even when compared on wall-clock runtime. (2) The winning submission in the self-tuning ruleset, based on the Schedule Free AdamW algorithm, demonstrates a new level of effectiveness for completely hyperparameter-free training algorithms. (3) The top-scoring submissions were surprisingly robust to workload changes. We also discuss the engineering challenges encountered in ensuring a fair comparison between different training algorithms. These results highlight both the significant progress so far, and the considerable room for further improvements.

TorchAudio: Building Blocks for Audio and Speech Processing

This document describes version 0.10 of torchaudio: building blocks for machine learning applications in the audio and speech processing domain. The objective of torchaudio is to accelerate the development and deployment of machine learning applications for researchers and engineers by providing off-the-shelf building blocks. The building blocks are designed to be GPU-compatible, automatically differentiable, and production-ready. torchaudio can be easily installed from Python Package Index repository and the source code is publicly available under a BSD-2-Clause License (as of September 2021) at https://github.com/pytorch/audio. In this document, we provide an overview of the design principles, functionalities, and benchmarks of torchaudio. We also benchmark our implementation of several audio and speech operations and models. We verify through the benchmarks that our implementations of various operations and models are valid and perform similarly to other publicly available implementations.