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Wenlin Chen

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Published work

7 published item(s)

preprint2026arXiv

LoKA: Low-precision Kernel Applications for Recommendation Models At Scale

Recent GPU generations deliver significantly higher FLOPs using lower-precision arithmetic, such as FP8. While successfully applied to large language models (LLMs), its adoption in large recommendation models (LRMs) has been limited. This is because LRMs are numerically sensitive, dominated by small matrix multiplications (GEMMs) followed by normalization, and trained in communication-intensive environments. Applying FP8 directly to LRMs often degrades model quality and prolongs training time. These challenges are inherent to LRM workloads and cannot be resolved merely by introducing better FP8 kernels. Instead, a system-model co-design approach is needed to successfully integrate FP8. We present LoKA (Low-precision Kernel Applications), a framework that makes FP8 practical for LRMs through three principles: profile under realistic distributions to know where low precision is safe, co-design model components with hardware to expand where it is safe, and orchestrate across kernel libraries to maximize the gains. Concretely, LoKA Probe is a statistically grounded, online benchmarking method that learns activation and weight statistics, and quantifies per-layer errors. This process pinpoints safe and unsafe, fast and slow sites for FP8 adoption. LoKA Mods is a set of reusable model adaptations that improve both numerical stability and execution efficiency with FP8. LoKA Dispatch is a runtime that leverages the statistical insights from LoKA Probe to select the fastest FP8 kernel that satisfies the accuracy requirements.

preprint2022arXiv

Optimal Client Sampling for Federated Learning

It is well understood that client-master communication can be a primary bottleneck in Federated Learning. In this work, we address this issue with a novel client subsampling scheme, where we restrict the number of clients allowed to communicate their updates back to the master node. In each communication round, all participating clients compute their updates, but only the ones with "important" updates communicate back to the master. We show that importance can be measured using only the norm of the update and give a formula for optimal client participation. This formula minimizes the distance between the full update, where all clients participate, and our limited update, where the number of participating clients is restricted. In addition, we provide a simple algorithm that approximates the optimal formula for client participation, which only requires secure aggregation and thus does not compromise client privacy. We show both theoretically and empirically that for Distributed SGD (DSGD) and Federated Averaging (FedAvg), the performance of our approach can be close to full participation and superior to the baseline where participating clients are sampled uniformly. Moreover, our approach is orthogonal to and compatible with existing methods for reducing communication overhead, such as local methods and communication compression methods.

preprint2020arXiv

To Ensemble or Not Ensemble: When does End-To-End Training Fail?

End-to-End training (E2E) is becoming more and more popular to train complex Deep Network architectures. An interesting question is whether this trend will continue-are there any clear failure cases for E2E training? We study this question in depth, for the specific case of E2E training an ensemble of networks. Our strategy is to blend the gradient smoothly in between two extremes: from independent training of the networks, up to to full E2E training. We find clear failure cases, where over-parameterized models cannot be trained E2E. A surprising result is that the optimum can sometimes lie in between the two, neither an ensemble or an E2E system. The work also uncovers links to Dropout, and raises questions around the nature of ensemble diversity and multi-branch networks.

preprint2016arXiv

Multi-Scale Convolutional Neural Networks for Time Series Classification

Time series classification (TSC), the problem of predicting class labels of time series, has been around for decades within the community of data mining and machine learning, and found many important applications such as biomedical engineering and clinical prediction. However, it still remains challenging and falls short of classification accuracy and efficiency. Traditional approaches typically involve extracting discriminative features from the original time series using dynamic time warping (DTW) or shapelet transformation, based on which an off-the-shelf classifier can be applied. These methods are ad-hoc and separate the feature extraction part with the classification part, which limits their accuracy performance. Plus, most existing methods fail to take into account the fact that time series often have features at different time scales. To address these problems, we propose a novel end-to-end neural network model, Multi-Scale Convolutional Neural Networks (MCNN), which incorporates feature extraction and classification in a single framework. Leveraging a novel multi-branch layer and learnable convolutional layers, MCNN automatically extracts features at different scales and frequencies, leading to superior feature representation. MCNN is also computationally efficient, as it naturally leverages GPU computing. We conduct comprehensive empirical evaluation with various existing methods on a large number of benchmark datasets, and show that MCNN advances the state-of-the-art by achieving superior accuracy performance than other leading methods.

preprint2015arXiv

Compressing Convolutional Neural Networks

Convolutional neural networks (CNN) are increasingly used in many areas of computer vision. They are particularly attractive because of their ability to "absorb" great quantities of labeled data through millions of parameters. However, as model sizes increase, so do the storage and memory requirements of the classifiers. We present a novel network architecture, Frequency-Sensitive Hashed Nets (FreshNets), which exploits inherent redundancy in both convolutional layers and fully-connected layers of a deep learning model, leading to dramatic savings in memory and storage consumption. Based on the key observation that the weights of learned convolutional filters are typically smooth and low-frequency, we first convert filter weights to the frequency domain with a discrete cosine transform (DCT) and use a low-cost hash function to randomly group frequency parameters into hash buckets. All parameters assigned the same hash bucket share a single value learned with standard back-propagation. To further reduce model size we allocate fewer hash buckets to high-frequency components, which are generally less important. We evaluate FreshNets on eight data sets, and show that it leads to drastically better compressed performance than several relevant baselines.

preprint2015arXiv

Compressing Neural Networks with the Hashing Trick

As deep nets are increasingly used in applications suited for mobile devices, a fundamental dilemma becomes apparent: the trend in deep learning is to grow models to absorb ever-increasing data set sizes; however mobile devices are designed with very little memory and cannot store such large models. We present a novel network architecture, HashedNets, that exploits inherent redundancy in neural networks to achieve drastic reductions in model sizes. HashedNets uses a low-cost hash function to randomly group connection weights into hash buckets, and all connections within the same hash bucket share a single parameter value. These parameters are tuned to adjust to the HashedNets weight sharing architecture with standard backprop during training. Our hashing procedure introduces no additional memory overhead, and we demonstrate on several benchmark data sets that HashedNets shrink the storage requirements of neural networks substantially while mostly preserving generalization performance.

preprint2014arXiv

A Reduction of the Elastic Net to Support Vector Machines with an Application to GPU Computing

The past years have witnessed many dedicated open-source projects that built and maintain implementations of Support Vector Machines (SVM), parallelized for GPU, multi-core CPUs and distributed systems. Up to this point, no comparable effort has been made to parallelize the Elastic Net, despite its popularity in many high impact applications, including genetics, neuroscience and systems biology. The first contribution in this paper is of theoretical nature. We establish a tight link between two seemingly different algorithms and prove that Elastic Net regression can be reduced to SVM with squared hinge loss classification. Our second contribution is to derive a practical algorithm based on this reduction. The reduction enables us to utilize prior efforts in speeding up and parallelizing SVMs to obtain a highly optimized and parallel solver for the Elastic Net and Lasso. With a simple wrapper, consisting of only 11 lines of MATLAB code, we obtain an Elastic Net implementation that naturally utilizes GPU and multi-core CPUs. We demonstrate on twelve real world data sets, that our algorithm yields identical results as the popular (and highly optimized) glmnet implementation but is one or several orders of magnitude faster.