The Framework Tax: Disparities Between Inference Efficiency in NLP Research and Deployment

Jared Fernandez, Jacob Kahn, Clara Na, Yonatan Bisk, Emma Strubell


Abstract
Increased focus on the computational efficiency of systems in natural language processing has motivated the design of efficient model architectures and improvements to underlying hardware accelerators. However, the resulting increases in computational throughput and reductions in floating point operations have not directly translated to improvements in wall-clock inference latency. We demonstrate that these discrepancies can be largely attributed to bottlenecks introduced by deep learning frameworks. We denote this phenomena as the framework tax, and observe that the disparity is growing as hardware speed increases over time. In this work, we examine this phenomena through a series of case studies analyzing the effects of model design decisions, framework paradigms, and hardware platforms on total model latency. Based on our findings, we provide actionable recommendations to researchers and practitioners aimed at narrowing the gap between efficient NLP model research and practice.
Anthology ID:
2023.emnlp-main.98
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Month:
December
Year:
2023
Address:
Singapore
Editors:
Houda Bouamor, Juan Pino, Kalika Bali
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
1588–1600
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.emnlp-main.98
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.emnlp-main.98
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Jared Fernandez, Jacob Kahn, Clara Na, Yonatan Bisk, and Emma Strubell. 2023. The Framework Tax: Disparities Between Inference Efficiency in NLP Research and Deployment. In Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 1588–1600, Singapore. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
The Framework Tax: Disparities Between Inference Efficiency in NLP Research and Deployment (Fernandez et al., EMNLP 2023)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.emnlp-main.98.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2023.emnlp-main.98.mp4