A Practical Layer-Parallel Training Algorithm for Residual Networks

Gradient-based algorithms for training ResNets typically require a forward pass of the input data, followed by back-propagating the objective gradient to update parameters, which are time-consuming for deep ResNets. To break the dependencies between modules in both the forward and backward modes, auxiliary-variable methods such as the penalty and augmented Lagrangian (AL) approaches have attracted much interest lately due to their ability to exploit layer-wise parallelism. However, we observe that large communication overhead and lacking data augmentation are two key challenges of these methods, which may lead to low speedup ratio and accuracy drop across multiple compute devices. Inspired by the optimal control formulation of ResNets, we propose a novel serial-parallel hybrid training strategy to enable the use of data augmentation, together with downsampling filters to reduce the communication cost. The proposed strategy first trains the network parameters by solving a succession of independent sub-problems in parallel and then corrects the network parameters through a full serial forward-backward propagation of data. Such a strategy can be applied to most of the existing layer-parallel training methods using auxiliary variables. As an example, we validate the proposed strategy using penalty and AL methods on ResNet and WideResNet across MNIST, CIFAR-10 and CIFAR-100 datasets, achieving significant speedup over the traditional layer-serial training methods while maintaining comparable accuracy.