Book Image

Distributed Machine Learning with Python

By : Guanhua Wang
Book Image

Distributed Machine Learning with Python

By: Guanhua Wang

Overview of this book

Reducing time cost in machine learning leads to a shorter waiting time for model training and a faster model updating cycle. Distributed machine learning enables machine learning practitioners to shorten model training and inference time by orders of magnitude. With the help of this practical guide, you'll be able to put your Python development knowledge to work to get up and running with the implementation of distributed machine learning, including multi-node machine learning systems, in no time. You'll begin by exploring how distributed systems work in the machine learning area and how distributed machine learning is applied to state-of-the-art deep learning models. As you advance, you'll see how to use distributed systems to enhance machine learning model training and serving speed. You'll also get to grips with applying data parallel and model parallel approaches before optimizing the in-parallel model training and serving pipeline in local clusters or cloud environments. By the end of this book, you'll have gained the knowledge and skills needed to build and deploy an efficient data processing pipeline for machine learning model training and inference in a distributed manner.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
1
Section 1 – Data Parallelism
6
Section 2 – Model Parallelism
11
Section 3 – Advanced Parallelism Paradigms

Fine-tuning transformers

In this section, we will discuss how to conduct fine-tuning on pre-trained transformer models. Here, we mainly focus on the BERT model, which is fully trained, and we will work on the SQuAD 2.0 dataset.

The whole code base for running custom training on the BERT model can be easily found on the Hugging Face website (https://huggingface.co/transformers/custom_datasets.html#qa-squad). Our previous model parallelism implementation can be directly applied to this code base to speed up model training and serving.

Here, we highlight the important steps in the workflow of fine-tuning BERT on SQuAD 2.0. The overview is shown in the following screenshot:

Figure 7.11 – Fine-tuning the transformer on downstream tasks

As shown in the preceding screenshot, the whole fine-tuning process involves three steps, as follows:

  1. Tokenize the input string.
  2. Download the pre-trained base model.
  3. Then, use the tokenized input to do...