Daydream: Accurately Estimating the Efficacy of Performance Optimizations for DNN Training
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Modern deep neural network (DNN) training uses a complex software/hardware stack used by machine learning (ML) practitioners are often heterogeneous. The efficacy of software-level optimizations can vary significantly when applied to different configurations. It is onerous and error-prone for ML practitioners and system developers to implement each optimization separately, and determine which ones will improve performance in their own configurations. Unfortunately, existing profiling tools do not aim to answer predictive questions such as “How will optimization X affect the performance of my model?”. This paper addresses this critical limitation, and proposes a new profiling tool, Daydream, to help programmers efficiently explore the efficacy of DNN optimizations. Daydream models DNN execution with a fine-grained dependency graph based on low-level traces collected by CUPTI, and predicts runtime by simulating execution based on the dependency graph. Daydream maps the low-level traces using DNN domain-specific knowledge, and introduces a set of graph-transformation primitives that can easily model a wide variety of optimizations. We show that Daydream is able to model most mainstream DNN optimization techniques, and accurately predict the efficacy of optimizations that will result in significant performance improvements.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it