In this task, you are given the abstract of a research paper. Your task is to generate a summary of this abstract. Your summary should not be very short, but it's better if it's not more than 30 words.

Ex Input:
Various gradient compression schemes have been proposed to mitigate the communication cost in distributed training of large scale machine learning models. Sign-based methods, such as signSGD (Bernstein et al., 2018), have recently been gaining popularity because of their simple compression rule and connection to adaptive gradient methods, like ADAM. In this paper, we perform a general analysis of sign-based methods for non-convex optimization. Our analysis is built on intuitive bounds on success probabilities and does not rely on special noise distributions nor on the boundedness of the variance of stochastic gradients. Extending the theory to distributed setting within a parameter server framework, we assure exponentially fast variance reduction with respect to number of nodes, maintaining 1-bit compression in both directions and using small mini-batch sizes. We validate our theoretical findings experimentally.

Ex Output:
General analysis of sign-based methods (e.g. signSGD) for non-convex optimization, built on intuitive bounds on success probabilities.


Ex Input:
Deep multitask networks, in which one neural network produces multiple predictive outputs, are more scalable and often better regularized than their single-task counterparts. Such advantages can potentially lead to gains in both speed and performance, but multitask networks are also difficult to train without finding the right balance between tasks. We present a novel gradient normalization (GradNorm) technique which automatically balances the multitask loss function by directly tuning the gradients to equalize task training rates. We show that for various network architectures, for both regression and classification tasks, and on both synthetic and real datasets, GradNorm improves accuracy and reduces overfitting over single networks, static baselines, and other adaptive multitask loss balancing techniques. GradNorm also matches or surpasses the performance of exhaustive grid search methods, despite only involving a single asymmetry hyperparameter $\alpha$. Thus, what was once a tedious search process which incurred exponentially more compute for each task added can now be accomplished within a few training runs, irrespective of the number of tasks. Ultimately, we hope to demonstrate that gradient manipulation affords us great control over the training dynamics of multitask networks and may be one of the keys to unlocking the potential of multitask learning.

Ex Output:
We show how you can boost performance in a multitask network by tuning an adaptive multitask loss function that is learned through directly balancing network gradients.


Ex Input:
Low bit-width integer weights and activations are very important for efficient inference, especially with respect to lower power consumption. We propose to apply Monte Carlo methods and importance sampling to sparsify and quantize pre-trained neural networks without any retraining. We obtain sparse, low bit-width integer representations that approximate the full precision weights and activations. The precision, sparsity, and complexity are easily configurable by the amount of sampling performed. Our approach, called Monte Carlo Quantization (MCQ), is linear in both time and space, while the resulting quantized sparse networks show minimal accuracy loss compared to the original full-precision networks. Our method either outperforms or achieves results competitive with methods that do require additional training on a variety of challenging tasks.

Ex Output:

Monte Carlo methods for quantizing pre-trained models without any additional training.