On The Fairness Impacts of Hardware Selection in Machine Learning

In the machine learning ecosystem, hardware selection is often regarded as a mere utility, overshadowed by the spotlight on algorithms and data. This oversight is particularly problematic in contexts like ML-as-a-service platforms, where users often lack control over the hardware used for model deployment. How does the choice of hardware impact generalization properties? This paper investigates the influence of hardware on the delicate balance between model performance and fairness. We demonstrate that hardware choices can exacerbate existing disparities, attributing these discrepancies to variations in gradient flows and loss surfaces across different demographic groups. Through both theoretical and empirical analysis, the paper not only identifies the underlying factors but also proposes an effective strategy for mitigating hardware-induced performance imbalances.

Accelerated CNN Training Through Gradient Approximation

Training deep convolutional neural networks such as VGG and ResNet by gradient descent is an expensive exercise requiring specialized hardware such as GPUs. Recent works have examined the possibility of approximating the gradient computation while maintaining the same convergence properties. While promising, the approximations only work on relatively small datasets such as MNIST. They also fail to achieve real wall-clock speedups due to lack of efficient GPU implementations of the proposed approximation methods. In this work, we explore three alternative methods to approximate gradients, with an efficient GPU kernel implementation for one of them. We achieve wall-clock speedup with ResNet-20 and VGG-19 on the CIFAR-10 dataset upwards of 7%, with a minimal loss in validation accuracy.