Reinforced Genetic Algorithm Learning for Optimizing Computation Graphs

Aditya Paliwal, Felix Gimeno, Vinod Nair, Yujia Li, Miles Lubin, Pushmeet Kohli, Oriol Vinyals

TL;DR: We use deep RL to learn a policy that directs the search of a genetic algorithm to better optimize the execution cost of computation graphs, and show improved results on real-world TensorFlow graphs.

Abstract: We present a deep reinforcement learning approach to minimizing the execution cost of neural network computation graphs in an optimizing compiler. Unlike earlier learning-based works that require training the optimizer on the same graph to be optimized, we propose a learning approach that trains an optimizer offline and then generalizes to previously unseen graphs without further training. This allows our approach to produce high-quality execution decisions on real-world TensorFlow graphs in seconds instead of hours. We consider two optimization tasks for computation graphs: minimizing running time and peak memory usage. In comparison to an extensive set of baselines, our approach achieves significant improvements over classical and other learning-based methods on these two tasks.

Keywords: reinforcement learning, learning to optimize, combinatorial optimization, computation graphs, model parallelism, learning for systems