Felix Yu

Felix Yu

I work on large-scale machine learning at Google. More info can be found at www.felixyu.org.
Authored Publications
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    Serving Graph Compression for Graph Neural Networks
    Cho-Jui Hsieh
    International Conference on Learning Representations (2023) (to appear)
    Preview abstract Serving a GNN model in online applications is challenging --- one has to propagate the information from training nodes to testing nodes to achieve the best performance, while storing the whole training set (including training graph and node features) during inference time is prohibitive for most of the real world applications. We tackle this serving space compression problem in the paper, where the goal is to compress the storage requirement for GNN serving. Given a model to be served, the proposed method constructs a small set of virtual representative nodes to replace the original training nodes, so that users just need to replace the original training set by this virtual representative set to reduce the space requirement for serving, without the need of changing the actual GNN model and the forward pass. We carefully analyze the error in the forward pass and derive simple ways to construct the node features and graph of virtual representative nodes to minimize the approximation error. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method can significantly reduce the serving space requirement for GNN inference. View details
    Preview abstract This paper reveals a curious observation that modern large-scale machine learning models with Transformer architectures have sparse activation maps. By activation map we refer to the intermediate output of the multi-layer perceptrons (MLPs) after a ReLU activation function, and by ``sparse'' we mean that on average very few entries (e.g., 3.0% for T5-Base and 6.3% for ViT-B16) are nonzero for each input to MLP. Through extensive experiments we demonstrate that the emergence of sparsity is a prevalent phenomenon that occurs for both natural language processing and vision tasks, on both training and evaluation data, for Transformers of various configurations, at layers of all depth levels, etc. Moreover, larger Transformers with more layers and higher MLP hidden dimensions are sparser as measured by the percentage of nonzero entries. To probe why sparsity emerges, we design experiments with random labels, random images, and infinite data, and find that sparsity may be due primarily to optimization while has little to do with the properties of training dataset. We discuss how sparsity immediately implies a means for significantly reducing the FLOP count and improving efficiency for Transformers. Moreover, we demonstrate perhaps surprisingly that explicitly enforcing an even sparser activation via Top-K thresholding with a small value of k brings a collection of desired but missing properties for Transformers, namely less sensitivity to noisy training data, more robustness to input corruptions, and better calibration for their prediction confidence. 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
    Preview abstract Knowledge distillation is an approach to improve the performance of a student model by using the knowledge of a complex teacher. Despite its success in several deep learning applications, the study of distillation is mostly confined to classification settings. In particular, the use of distillation in top-k ranking settings, where the goal is to rank k most relevant items correctly, remains largely unexplored. In this paper, we study such ranking problems through the lens of distillation. We present a framework for distillation for top-k ranking and establish connections with the existing ranking methods. The core idea of this framework is to preserve the ranking at the top by matching the k largest scores of student and teacher while penalizing large scores for items ranked low by the teacher. Building on our framework, we develop a novel distillation approach, RankDistil, specifically catered towards ranking problems with a large number of items to rank. Finally, we conduct experiments which demonstrate that RankDistil yields benefits over commonly used baselines for ranking problems. View details
    Preview abstract Negative sampling is a widely adopted technique to enable efficient training in settings with a large number of classes. Typically, negative sampling approaches aim at approximating the value or gradient of the computationally expensive loss function that takes all the negative labels into account. In this work, we study the connection between negative sampling approaches and loss modification techniques for countering label imbalance. We show that different (bias) correction strategies that accompany negative sampling approaches can have unintended consequences on the model's performance on various data sub-populations. We then propose a unified approach to tackle both sampling bias, arising from working with a subset of all negative classes, and labeling bias, which is inherently present in the data due to label-imbalance. Finally, we verify our analysis and demonstrate the utility of our unified approach through empirical evaluation on standard image classification and retrieval benchmarks. View details
    Preview abstract We consider the large-scale query-document retrieval problem: given a query (e.g., a question), return the set of relevant documents (e.g., paragraphs containing the answer) from a large document corpus. This problem is often solved in two steps. The retrieval phase first reduces the solution space, returning a subset of candidate documents. The scoring phase then re-ranks the documents. Critically, the retrieval algorithm not only desires high recall but also requires to be highly efficient, returning candidates in time sublinear to the number of documents. Unlike the scoring phase witnessing significant advances recently due to the BERT-style pre-training tasks on cross-attention models, the retrieval phase remains less well studied. Most previous works rely on classic Information Retrieval (IR) methods such as BM-25 (token matching + TF-IDF weights). These models only accept sparse handcrafted features and can not be optimized for different downstream tasks of interest. In this paper, we conduct a comprehensive study on the embedding-based retrieval models. We show that the key ingredient of learning a strong embedding-based Transformer model is the set of pre-training tasks. With adequately designed paragraph-level pre-training tasks, the Transformer models can remarkably improve over the widely-used BM-25 as well as embedding models without Transformers. The paragraph-level pre-training tasks we studied are Inverse Cloze Task (ICT), Body First Selection (BFS), Wiki Link Prediction (WLP), and the combination of all three. View details
    Preview abstract Large Transformer models have achieved impressive performance in many natural language tasks. In particular, Transformer based language models have been shown to have great capabilities in encoding factual knowledge in their vast amount of parameters. While the tasks of improving the memorization and generalization of Transformers have been widely studied, it is not well known how to make transformers forget specific old facts and memorize new ones. In this paper, we propose a new task of \emph{explicitly modifying specific factual knowledge in Transformer models while ensuring the model performance does not degrade on the unmodified facts}. This task is useful in many scenarios, such as updating stale knowledge, protecting privacy, and eliminating unintended biases stored in the models. We benchmarked several approaches that provide natural baseline performances on this task. This leads to the discovery of key components of a Transformer model that are especially effective for knowledge modifications. The work also provides insights into the role that different training phases (such as pretraining and fine-tuning) play towards memorization and knowledge modification. View details
    Preview abstract We consider learning a multi-class classification model in the federated setting, where each user has access to the positive data associated with only a single class. As a result, during each federated learning round, the users need to locally update the classifier without having access to the features and the model parameters for the negative classes. Thus, naively employing conventional decentralized learning such as the distributed SGD or Federated Averaging may lead to trivial or extremely poor classifiers. In particular, for the embedding based classifiers, all the class embeddings might collapse to a single point. To address this problem, we propose a generic framework for training with only positive labels, namely Federated Averaging with Spreadout (FedAwS), where the server imposes a geometric regularizer after each round to encourage classes to be spreadout in the embedding space. We show, both theoretically and empirically, that FedAwS can almost match the performance of conventional learning where users have access to negative labels. We further extend the proposed method to the settings with large output spaces. View details
    Preview abstract Label smoothing has been shown to be an effective regularization strategy in classification, that prevents overfitting and helps in label de-noising. However, extending such methods directly to seq2seq settings, such as Machine Translation, has been hindered by the large target output space, making it intractable to apply label smoothing over all possible outputs. Most existing approaches for seq2seq settings either do token level smoothing, or smooth over sequences generated by randomly substituting tokens in the target sequence. Unlike these works, in this paper, we propose a technique that smooths over \emph{well formed} relevant sequences that not only have sufficient n-gram overlap with the target sequence, but are also \emph{semantically similar}. Our method shows a consistent and significant improvement over the state-of-the-art techniques on different datasets. View details
    Preview abstract We consider the problem of retrieving the most relevant labels for a given input when the size of the output space is very large. Retrieval methods are modeled as set-valued classifiers which output a small set of classes for each input, and a mistake is made if the label is not in the output set. Despite its practical importance, a statistically principled, yet practical solution to this problem is largely missing. To this end, we first define a family of surrogate losses and show that they are calibrated and convex under certain conditions on the loss parameters and data distribution, thereby establishing a statistical and analytical basis for using these losses. Furthermore, we identify a particularly intuitive class of loss functions in the aforementioned family and show that they are amenable to practical implementation in the large output space setting (i.e. computation is possible without evaluating scores of all labels) by developing a technique called Stochastic Negative Mining. We also provide generalization error bounds for the losses in the family. Finally, we conduct experiments which demonstrate that Stochastic Negative Mining yields benefits over commonly used negative sampling approaches. View details