Online Shuffling in HDF5 File Storage#
Our data processing pipeline integrates an innovative online shuffling feature that seamlessly interacts with HDF5 storage. This crucial functionality prevents machine learning models from learning the data order and ensures randomized distribution of data sequences, leading to improved model robustness and performance.
How Online Shuffing Works#
Our novel online shuffling mechanism operates seamlessly with HDF5 storage, eliminating the need for post-processing and its associated memory overhead.
By interleaving shuffling with data serialization, it efficiently randomizes data sequences as they are written to files, significantly reducing processing time.
To activate this functionality, simply specify the shuffle flag and provide a seed with the shuffle_seed flag within your data pre-processing configuration file.
Implementation Details#
During the HDF5 file writing operation, each sequence of tokenized data is assigned a random index that determines its placement in the output files.
This randomization ensures that upon reading the data back for training purposes, the sequences are already shuffled.
The shuffling operation is handled efficiently, allowing the system to process and shuffle large datasets without excessive memory usage.
Advantages of Online Shuffling#
Efficiency: By eliminating the need for a separate shuffling step, we save on both processing time and memory.
Scalability: This approach scales elegantly with the size of the dataset, suitable for large-scale machine learning tasks.
Simplicity: Reduces the complexity of the data preparation pipeline by integrating shuffling into the data writing process.