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Tuning Strategies

Introduction

Intel® Neural Compressor aims to help users quickly deploy the low-precision inference solution on popular Deep Learning frameworks such as TensorFlow, PyTorch, and MxNet. Using built-in strategies, it automatically optimizes low-precision recipes for deep learning models to achieve optimal product objectives, such as inference performance and memory usage, with expected accuracy criteria. Currently, it supports Basic, Bayesian, Exhaustive, MSE, Random, SigOpt and TPE strategies. Basic is the default strategy.

Strategy Design

Each strategy generates the next quantization configuration according to its logic and the last quantization result. The function of strategies is shown below:

Tuning Strategy

Strategies begin with an adaptor layer (Framework Adaptor) where the user passes a framework-specific model to initialize an instance of the neural_compressor.Quantization() class; strategies call the self.adaptor.query_fw_capability(model) to get the framework and model-specific quantization capabilities. From there, each strategy merges model-specific configurations in a yaml configuration file to filter some capability from the first step in order to generate the tuning space. Each strategy then generates the quantization config according to its location and logic with tuning strategy configurations from the yaml configuration file. All strategies finish the tuning processing when the timeout or max_trails is reached. The default value of timeout is 0; if reached, the tuning phase stops when the accuracy criteria is met.

Configurations

Detailed configuration templates can be found here.

Model-specific configurations

For model-specific configurations, users can set the quantization approach. For post-training static quantization, users can also set calibration and quantization-related parameters for model-wise and op-wise:

quantization:                                        # optional. tuning constraints on model-wise for advance user to reduce tuning space.
  approach: post_training_static_quant               # optional. default value is post_training_static_quant.
  recipes:
    scale_propagation_max_pooling: True              # optional. default value is True.
    scale_propagation_concat: True                   # optional. default value is True.
    first_conv_or_matmul_quantization: True          # optional. default value is True.
  calibration:
    sampling_size: 1000, 2000                        # optional. default value is 100. used to set how many samples should be used in calibration.
    dataloader:                                      # optional. if not specified, user need construct a q_dataloader in code for neural_compressor.Quantization.
      dataset:
        TFRecordDataset:
          root: /path/to/tf_record
      transform:
        Resize:
          size: 256
        CenterCrop:
          size: 224
  model_wise:                                        # optional. tuning constraints on model-wise for advance user to reduce tuning space.
    weight:
      granularity: per_channel
      scheme: asym
      dtype: int8
      algorithm: minmax
    activation:
      granularity: per_tensor
      scheme: asym
      dtype: int8, fp32
      algorithm: minmax, kl
  op_wise: {                                         # optional. tuning constraints on op-wise for advance user to reduce tuning space. 
         'conv1': {
           'activation':  {'dtype': ['uint8', 'fp32'], 'algorithm': ['minmax', 'kl'], 'scheme':['sym']},
           'weight': {'dtype': ['int8', 'fp32'], 'algorithm': ['kl']}
         },
         'pool1': {
           'activation': {'dtype': ['int8'], 'scheme': ['sym'], 'granularity': ['per_tensor'], 'algorithm': ['minmax', 'kl']},
         },
         'conv2': {
           'activation':  {'dtype': ['fp32']},
           'weight': {'dtype': ['fp32']}
         }
       }

Strategy tuning part-related configurations

In strategy tuning part-related configurations, users can choose a specific tuning strategy and then set the accuracy criterion and optimization objective for tuning. Users can also set the stop condition for the tuning by changing the exit_policy:

tuning:
  strategy:
    name: basic                                      # optional. default value is basic. other values are bayesian, mse.
  accuracy_criterion:
    relative:  0.01                                  # optional. default value is relative, other value is absolute. this example allows relative accuracy loss: 1%.
  objective: performance                             # optional. objective with accuracy constraint guaranteed. default value is performance. other values are modelsize and footprint.

  exit_policy:
    timeout: 0                                       # optional. tuning timeout (seconds). default value is 0 which means early stop. combine with max_trials field to decide when to exit.
    max_trials: 100                                  # optional. max tune times. default value is 100. combine with timeout field to decide when to exit.
    performance_only: False                          # optional. max tune times. default value is False which means only generate fully quantized model.
  random_seed: 9527                                  # optional. random seed for deterministic tuning.
  tensorboard: True                                  # optional. dump tensor distribution in evaluation phase for debug purpose. default value is False.

Basic

Design

Basic strategy is designed for most models to do quantization. It includes three steps. First, Basic strategy tries all model-wise tuning configs to get the best quantized model. If none of the model-wise tuning configs meet the accuracy loss criteria, Basic applies the second step. In this step, it performs high-precision OP (FP32, BF16 ...) fallbacks one-by-one based on the best model-wise tuning config, and records the impact of each OP on accuracy and then sorts accordingly. In the final step, Basic tries to incrementally fallback multiple OPs to high precision according to the sorted OP list that is generated in the second step until the accuracy goal is achieved.

Usage

Basic is the default strategy. It can be used by default if you don't add the strategy field in your yaml configuration file. Classical settings in the configuration file are shown below:

tuning:
  accuracy_criterion:
    relative:  0.01
  exit_policy:
    timeout: 0
  random_seed: 9527

Bayesian

Design

Bayesian optimization is a sequential design strategy for the global optimization of black-box functions. This strategy comes from the Bayesian optimization package and changed it to a discrete version that complied with the strategy standard of Intel® Neural Compressor. It uses Gaussian processes to define the prior/posterior distribution over the black-box function with the tuning history, and then finds the tuning configuration that maximizes the expected improvement. For now, Bayesian just focus on op-wise quantize configs tuning without fallback phase. In order to obtain a quantized model with good accuracy and better performance in a short time, we don't add datatype as a tuning parameter into Bayesian.

Usage

For the Bayesian strategy, set the timeout or max_trials to a non-zero value as shown in the below example. This is because the param space for bayesian can be very small so the accuracy goal might not be reached which can make the tuning never end. Additionally, if the log level is set to debug by LOGLEVEL=DEBUG in the environment, the message [DEBUG] Tuning config was evaluated, skip! will print endlessly. If the timeout is changed from 0 to an integer, Bayesian ends after the timeout is reached.

tuning:
  strategy:
    name: bayesian
  accuracy_criterion:
    relative:  0.01
  objective: performance

  exit_policy:
    timeout: 0
    max_trials: 100

MSE

Design

MSE and Basic strategies share similar ideas. The primary difference between the two strategies is the way sorted op lists are generated in step 2. The MSE strategy needs to get the tensors for each operator of raw FP32 models and the quantized model based on the best model-wise tuning configuration. It then calculates the MSE (Mean Squared Error) for each operator, sorts those operators according to the MSE value, and performs the op-wise fallback in this order.

Usage

MSE is similar to Basic but the specific strategy name of mse must be included.

tuning:
  strategy:
    name: mse
  accuracy_criterion:
    relative:  0.01
  exit_policy:
    timeout: 0
  random_seed: 9527

TPE

Design

TPE uses sequential model-based optimization methods (SMBOs). **Sequential ** refers to running trials one after another and selecting a better hyperparameter to evaluate based on previous trials. A hyperparameter is a parameter whose value is set before the learning process begins; it controls the learning process. SMBO apples Bayesian reasoning in that it updates a surrogate model that represents an objective function (objective functions are more expensive to compute). Specifically, it finds hyperparameters that perform best on the surrogate and then applies them to the objective function. The process is repeated and the surrogate is updated with incorporated new results until the timeout or max trials is reached.

A surrogate model and selection criteria can be built in a variety of ways. TPE builds a surrogate model by applying Bayesian reasoning. The TPE algorithm consists of the following steps:

  1. Define a domain of hyperparameter search space.
  2. Create an objective function which takes in hyperparameters and outputs a score (e.g., loss, RMSE, cross-entropy) that we want to minimize.
  3. Collect a few observations (score) using a randomly selected set of hyperparameters.
  4. Sort the collected observations by score and divide them into two groups based on some quantile. The first group (x1) contains observations that gives the best scores and the second one (x2) contains all other observations.
  5. Model the two densities l(x1) and g(x2) using Parzen Estimators (also known as kernel density estimators) which are a simple average of kernels centered on existing data points.
  6. Draw sample hyperparameters from l(x1). Evaluate them in terms of l(x1)/g(x2), and return the set that yields the minimum value under l(x1)/g(x1) that corresponds to the greatest expected improvement. Evaluate these hyperparameters on the objective function.
  7. Update the observation list in step 3.
  8. Repeat steps 4-7 with a fixed number of trials.

Note: TPE requires many iterations in order to reach an optimal solution; we recommend running at least 200 iterations. Because every iteration requires evaluation of a generated model--which means accuracy measurements on a dataset and latency measurements using a benchmark--this process can take from 24 hours to few days to complete, depending on the model.

Usage

TPE usage is similar to Bayesian:

tuning:
  strategy:
    name: bayesian
  accuracy_criterion:
    relative:  0.01
  objective: performance

  exit_policy:
    timeout: 0
    max_trials: 100

Exhaustive

Design

Exhaustive strategy is used to sequentially traverse all possible tuning configurations in a tuning space. From the perspective of the impact on performance, we currently only traverse all possible quantize tuning configs. Same reason as Bayesian, fallback datatypes are not included for now.

Usage

Exhaustive usage is similar to Basic:

tuning:
  strategy:
    name: exhaustive
  accuracy_criterion:
    relative:  0.01
  exit_policy:
    timeout: 0
  random_seed: 9527

Random

Design

Random strategy is used to randomly choose tuning configurations from the tuning space. As with Exhaustive strategy, it also only considers quantize tuning configs to generate a better-performance quantized model.

Usage

Random usage is similar to Basic:

tuning:
  strategy:
    name: random 
  accuracy_criterion:
    relative:  0.01
  exit_policy:
    timeout: 0
  random_seed: 9527

SigOpt

Design

SigOpt strategy is to use SigOpt Optimization Loop method to accelerate and visualize the traversal of the tuning configurations from the tuning space. The metrics add accuracy as constraint and optimize for latency to improve the performance. SigOpt Projects can show the result of each tuning experiment.

Usage

Compare to Basic, sigopt_api_token and sigopt_project_id is necessary for SigOpt.sigopt_experiment_name is optional, the default name is nc-tune.

tuning:
  strategy:
    name: sigopt
    sigopt_api_token: YOUR-ACCOUNT-API-TOKEN
    sigopt_project_id: PROJECT-ID
    sigopt_experiment_name: nc-tune
  accuracy_criterion:
    relative:  0.01
  exit_policy:
    timeout: 0
  random_seed: 9527

For details, how to use sigopt strategy in neural_compressor is available.

Customize a New Tuning Strategy

Intel® Neural Compressor supports new strategy extension by implementing a subclass of TuneStrategy class in neural_compressor.strategy package and registering this strategy by strategy_registry decorator.

for example, user can implement a Abc strategy like below:

@strategy_registry
class AbcTuneStrategy(TuneStrategy):
    def __init__(self, model, conf, q_dataloader, q_func=None,
                 eval_dataloader=None, eval_func=None, dicts=None):
        ...

    def next_tune_cfg(self):
        ...

The next_tune_cfg function is used to yield the next tune configuration according to some algorithm or strategy. TuneStrategy base class will traverse all the tuning space till a quantization configuration meets pre-defined accuracy criterion.

If the traverse behavior of TuneStrategy base class does not meet new strategy requirement, it could re-implement traverse function with self own logic. An example like this is under TPE Strategy.