AdaLearner: An adaptive distributed mobile learning system for neural networks

Neural networks hold a critical domain in machine learning algorithms because of their self-adaptiveness and state-of-the-art performance. Before the testing (inference) phases in practical use, sophisticated training (learning) phases are required, calling for efficient training methods with higher accuracy and shorter converging time. Many existing studies focus on the training optimization on high-performance servers or computing clusters, e.g. GPU clusters. However, training neural networks on resource-constrained devices, e.g. mobile platforms, is an important research topic barely touched. In this paper, we implement AdaLearner-an adaptive distributed mobile learning system for neural networks that trains a single network with heterogenous mobile resources under the same local network in parallel. To exploit the potential of our system, we adapt neural networks training phase to mobile device-wise resources and fiercely decrease the transmission overhead for better system scalability. On three representative neural network structures trained from two image classification datasets, AdaLearner boosts the training phase significantly. For example, on LeNet, 1.75-3.37X speedup is achieved when increasing the worker nodes from 2 to 8, thanks to the achieved high execution parallelism and excellent scalability.