Can LLMs Enhance Performance Prediction for Deep Learning Models?

Accurate performance prediction of Deep Learning (DL) models is essential for efficient resource allocation and optimizations in various stages of the DL system stack. While existing approaches can achieve high prediction accuracy, they lack the ability to quickly adapt to new hardware environments or emerging workloads. This paper leverages both Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) and Large Language Models (LLMs) to enhance the accuracy and adaptability of DL performance prediction. Our intuition is that GNNs are adept at capturing the structural information of DL models, naturally represented as graphs, while LLMs provide generalization and the ability to quickly adapt to various tasks thanks to extensive pre-training data.We empirically demonstrate that using GNN-derived graph embeddings as inputs to an LLM outperforms traditional representations, including high-level text summary and lossless semi-structured text (e.g., JSON), for this task. Furthermore, we propose a structured pre-training strategy to enable model adaptation to new hardware environments, significantly reducing the need for extensive retraining. Our experiments validate the effectiveness of this approach, showing an 8.8 percentage-point improvement in accuracy over a state-of-the-art GNN baseline. Notably, when adapted to new hardware with few samples, our method achieves a remarkable 30--70 percentage-point increase in accuracy compared to the GNN baseline.