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Observability in cloud infrastructure is critical for service providers, driving the widespread adoption of anomaly detection systems for monitoring metrics. However, existing systems often struggle to simultaneously achieve explainability, reproducibility, and autonomy, which are three indispensable properties for production use. We introduce Argos, an agentic system for detecting time-series anomalies in cloud infrastructure by leveraging large language models (LLMs). Argos proposes to use explainable and reproducible anomaly rules as intermediate representation and employs LLMs to autonomously generate such rules. The system will efficiently train error-free and accuracy-guaranteed anomaly rules through multiple collaborative agents and deploy the trained rules for low-cost online anomaly detection. Through evaluation results, we demonstrate that Argos outperforms state-of-the-art methods, increasing $F_1$ scores by up to $9.5\%$ and $28.3\%$ on public anomaly detection datasets and an internal dataset collected from Microsoft, respectively.

Voice disorders negatively impact the quality of daily life in various ways. However, accurately recognizing the category of pathological features from raw audio remains a considerable challenge due to the limited dataset. A promising method to handle this issue is extracting multi-level pathological information from speech in a comprehensive manner by fusing features in the latent space. In this paper, a novel framework is designed to explore the way of high-quality feature fusion for effective and generalized detection performance. Specifically, the proposed model follows a two-stage training paradigm: (1) ECAPA-TDNN and Wav2vec 2.0 which have shown remarkable effectiveness in various domains are employed to learn the universal pathological information from raw audio; (2) An attentive fusion module is dedicatedly designed to establish the interaction between pathological features projected by EcapTdnn and Wav2vec 2.0 respectively and guide the multi-layer fusion, the entire model is jointly fine-tuned from pre-trained features by the automatic voice pathology detection task. Finally, comprehensive experiments on the FEMH and SVD datasets demonstrate that the proposed framework outperforms the competitive baselines, and achieves the accuracy of 90.51% and 87.68%.

Decompilation, the process of converting machine-level code into readable source code, plays a critical role in reverse engineering. Given that the main purpose of decompilation is to facilitate code comprehension in scenarios where the source code is unavailable, the understandability of decompiled code is of great importance. In this paper, we propose the first empirical study on the understandability of Java decompiled code and obtained the following findings: (1) Understandability of Java decompilation is considered as important as its correctness, and decompilation understandability issues are even more commonly encountered than decompilation failures. (2) A notable percentage of code snippets decompiled by Java decompilers exhibit significantly lower or higher levels of understandability in comparison to their original source code. (3) Unfortunately, Cognitive Complexity demonstrates relatively acceptable precision while low recall in recognizing these code snippets exhibiting diverse understandability during decompilation. (4) Even worse, perplexity demonstrates lower levels of precision and recall in recognizing such code snippets. Inspired by the four findings, we further proposed six code patterns and the first metric for the assessment of decompiled code understandability. This metric was extended from Cognitive Complexity, with six more rules harvested from an exhaustive manual analysis into 1287 pairs of source code snippets and corresponding decompiled code. This metric was also validated using the original and updated dataset, yielding an impressive macro F1-score of 0.88 on the original dataset, and 0.86 on the test set., Comment: 18 pages, 16 figures

Hollow-core fibers are inherently multimode, making it crucial to filter out higher-order modes within the shortest possible fiber length for applications such as high speed coherent communications and fiber optic gyroscopes. However, current HCF designs face the challenges of simultaneously achieving ultralow fundamental mode loss and ultrahigh HOM suppression. In this study, we present a novel four fold truncated double nested anti resonant hollow core fiber structure that addresses this challenge. Our 4T-DNANF enables greater control over phase-matching between core modes and air modes in the cladding, allowing for minimized FM loss and substantially increased HOM loss. Experimentally, we fabricated several HCFs: one with an FM loss of 0.1 dB/km and an HOM loss of 430 dB/km, and another with an FM loss of 0.13 dB/km with a HOM loss of 6500 dB/km, resulting in a higher-order mode extinction ratio of 50,000., Comment: 8 pages, 2 figures

Reliability in cloud AI infrastructure is crucial for cloud service providers, prompting the widespread use of hardware redundancies. However, these redundancies can inadvertently lead to hidden degradation, so called "gray failure", for AI workloads, significantly affecting end-to-end performance and concealing performance issues, which complicates root cause analysis for failures and regressions. We introduce SuperBench, a proactive validation system for AI infrastructure that mitigates hidden degradation caused by hardware redundancies and enhances overall reliability. SuperBench features a comprehensive benchmark suite, capable of evaluating individual hardware components and representing most real AI workloads. It comprises a Validator which learns benchmark criteria to clearly pinpoint defective components. Additionally, SuperBench incorporates a Selector to balance validation time and issue-related penalties, enabling optimal timing for validation execution with a tailored subset of benchmarks. Through testbed evaluation and simulation, we demonstrate that SuperBench can increase the mean time between incidents by up to 22.61x. SuperBench has been successfully deployed in Azure production, validating hundreds of thousands of GPUs over the last two years., Comment: USENIX ATC '24

In this paper, we explore FP8 low-bit data formats for efficient training of large language models (LLMs). Our key insight is that most variables, such as gradients and optimizer states, in LLM training can employ low-precision data formats without compromising model accuracy and requiring no changes to hyper-parameters. Specifically, we propose a new FP8 automatic mixed-precision framework for training LLMs. This framework offers three levels of FP8 utilization to streamline mixed-precision and distributed parallel training for LLMs. It gradually incorporates 8-bit gradients, optimizer states, and distributed learning in an incremental manner. Experiment results show that, during the training of GPT-175B model on H100 GPU platform, our FP8 mixed-precision training framework not only achieved a remarkable 39% reduction in real memory usage but also ran 75% faster than the widely adopted BF16 framework (i.e., Megatron-LM), surpassing the speed of Nvidia Transformer Engine by 37%. This largely reduces the training costs for large foundation models. Furthermore, our FP8 mixed-precision training methodology is generic. It can be seamlessly applied to other tasks such as LLM instruction tuning and reinforcement learning with human feedback, offering savings in fine-tuning expenses. Our FP8 low-precision training framework is open-sourced at {https://github.com/Azure/MS-AMP}{aka.ms/MS.AMP}.

Sparsely-gated mixture-of-experts (MoE) has been widely adopted to scale deep learning models to trillion-plus parameters with fixed computational cost. The algorithmic performance of MoE relies on its token routing mechanism that forwards each input token to the right sub-models or experts. While token routing dynamically determines the amount of expert workload at runtime, existing systems suffer inefficient computation due to their static execution, namely static parallelism and pipelining, which does not adapt to the dynamic workload. We present Flex, a highly scalable stack design and implementation for MoE with dynamically adaptive parallelism and pipelining. Flex designs an identical layout for distributing MoE model parameters and input data, which can be leveraged by all possible parallelism or pipelining methods without any mathematical inequivalence or tensor migration overhead. This enables adaptive parallelism/pipelining optimization at zero cost during runtime. Based on this key design, Flex also implements various MoE acceleration techniques. Aggregating all techniques, Flex finally delivers huge speedup at any scale -- 4.96x and 5.75x speedup of a single MoE layer over 16 and 2,048 A100 GPUs, respectively, over the previous state-of-the-art. Our evaluation shows that Flex efficiently and effectively runs a real-world MoE-based model named SwinV2-MoE, built upon Swin Transformer V2, a state-of-the-art computer vision architecture. On efficiency, Flex accelerates SwinV2-MoE, achieving up to 1.55x and 2.11x speedup in training and inference over Fairseq, respectively. On effectiveness, the SwinV2-MoE model achieves superior accuracy in both pre-training and down-stream computer vision tasks such as COCO object detection than the counterpart dense model, indicating the readiness of Flex for end-to-end real-world model training and inference.

Machine learning models made up of millions or billions of parameters are trained and served on large multi-GPU systems. As models grow in size and execute on more GPUs, the collective communications used in these applications become a bottleneck. Custom collective algorithms optimized for both particular network topologies and application specific communication patterns can alleviate this bottleneck and help these applications scale. However, correctly and efficiently implementing custom algorithms is challenging. This paper introduces GC3, a system for programmable GPU communication. GC3 provides a domain specific language for writing collective communication algorithms and an optimizing compiler for lowering them to an executable form, which can be executed efficiently and flexibly in an interpreter based runtime. We used GC3 to write novel collective algorithms for AllReduce and AllToAll that are up to $1.9\times$ and $1.3\times$ faster than hand-optimized implementations, respectively.