Analyzing a Caching Model

Machine Learning has been successfully applied in systems applications such as memory prefetching and caching, where learned models have been shown to outperform heuristics. However, the lack of understanding the inner workings of these models -- interpretability -- remains a major obstacle for adop...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published inarXiv.org
Main Authors Sixt, Leon, Liu, Evan Zheran, Pellat, Marie, Wexler, James, Hashemi, Milad, Been, Kim, Maas, Martin
Format Paper
LanguageEnglish
Published Ithaca Cornell University Library, arXiv.org 11.02.2022
Subjects
Caching
Machine learning
Online AccessGet full text

Cover

More Information
Summary:Machine Learning has been successfully applied in systems applications such as memory prefetching and caching, where learned models have been shown to outperform heuristics. However, the lack of understanding the inner workings of these models -- interpretability -- remains a major obstacle for adoption in real-world deployments. Understanding a model's behavior can help system administrators and developers gain confidence in the model, understand risks, and debug unexpected behavior in production. Interpretability for models used in computer systems poses a particular challenge: Unlike ML models trained on images or text, the input domain (e.g., memory access patterns, program counters) is not immediately interpretable. A major challenge is therefore to explain the model in terms of concepts that are approachable to a human practitioner. By analyzing a state-of-the-art caching model, we provide evidence that the model has learned concepts beyond simple statistics that can be leveraged for explanations. Our work provides a first step towards explanability of system ML models and highlights both promises and challenges of this emerging research area.
ISSN:2331-8422