Zhouyuan Huo

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    Preview abstract Self- and Semi-supervised learning methods have been actively investigated to reduce labeled training data or enhance the model performance. However, the approach mostly focus on in-domain performance for public datasets. In this study, we utilize the combination of self- and semi-supervised learning methods to solve unseen domain adaptation problem in a large-scale production setting for online ASR model. This approach demonstrates that using the source domain data with a small fraction of the target domain data (3%) can recover the performance gap compared to a full data baseline: relative 13.5% WER improvement for target domain data. View details
    Preview abstract Human labeling is expensive. Labeling is the most painful step for ML production. It’s widely believed that data is the new gold and big tech companies have an unfair advantage. Is it true that unlimited data unlimits model performance? In this study, we show 1k hrs human labeled data is enough for the best ASR model. The model trained with 1k hrs human labels and 26k hrs pseudo labels has better WERs than the model with 27k hrs human labels. Pseudo label training improves WERs of the production model by a significant margin; 5.9 to 5.1 on voice search. It means pseudo label quality is better than human label. To have quality pseudo labels, we utilized recent self/semi-supervised learning for a large ASR model. View details
    A Field Guide to Federated Optimization
    Jianyu Wang
    Gauri Joshi
    Maruan Al-Shedivat
    Galen Andrew
    A. Salman Avestimehr
    Katharine Daly
    Deepesh Data
    Suhas Diggavi
    Hubert Eichner
    Advait Gadhikar
    Antonious M. Girgis
    Filip Hanzely
    Chaoyang He
    Samuel Horvath
    Martin Jaggi
    Tara Javidi
    Satyen Chandrakant Kale
    Sai Praneeth Karimireddy
    Jakub Konečný
    Sanmi Koyejo
    Tian Li
    Peter Richtarik
    Karan Singhal
    Virginia Smith
    Mahdi Soltanolkotabi
    Weikang Song
    Sebastian Stich
    Ameet Talwalkar
    Hongyi Wang
    Blake Woodworth
    Honglin Yuan
    Mi Zhang
    Tong Zhang
    Chunxiang (Jake) Zheng
    Chen Zhu
    arxiv (2021)
    Preview abstract Federated learning and analytics are a distributed approach for collaboratively learning models (or statistics) from decentralized data, motivated by and designed for privacy protection. The distributed learning process can be formulated as solving federated optimization problems, which emphasize communication efficiency, data heterogeneity, compatibility with privacy and system requirements, and other constraints that are not primary considerations in other problem settings. This paper provides recommendations and guidelines on formulating, designing, evaluating and analyzing federated optimization algorithms through concrete examples and practical implementation, with a focus on conducting effective simulations to infer real-world performance. The goal of this work is not to survey the current literature, but to inspire researchers and practitioners to design federated learning algorithms that can be used in various practical applications. View details
    On Large-Cohort Training for Federated Learning
    Sergei Shmulyian
    Virginia Smith
    Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems (2021)
    Preview abstract Federated learning methods typically learn a model by iteratively sampling updates from a population of clients. In this work, we explore how the number of clients sampled at each round (the cohort size) impacts the quality of the learned model and the training dynamics of federated learning algorithms. Our work poses three fundamental questions. First, what challenges arise when trying to scale federated learning to larger cohorts? Second, what parallels exist between cohort sizes in federated learning and batch sizes in centralized learning? Last, how can we design federated learning methods that effectively utilize larger cohort sizes? We give partial answers to these questions based on extensive empirical evaluation. Our work highlights a number of challenges stemming from the use of larger cohorts. While some of these (such as generalization issues and diminishing returns) are analogs of large-batch training challenges, others (including training failures and fairness concerns) are unique to federated learning. View details