Your right that the serialization / deserialization overhead can quickly exceed the compute time. To avoid this you have to get a lot of small things right. And given our focus on ML workloads, this is particularly important when sharing large numerical arrays between processes (especially processes running on the same node).
One of the key things is to make sure the serialized object is stored in a data format where the serialized object does not need to be "transformed" in order to access it. For example, a numpy array can be created in O(1) time from a serialized blob by initializing a Python object with the right shape and dtype and a pointer to the right offset in the serialized blob. We also use projects like Apache Arrow that put a lot of care into this.
Example in more detail:
Imagine the object you are passing from process A to process B is a 1GB numpy array of floats. In the serialization step, process A produces a serialized blob of bytes that is basically just the 1GB numpy array plus a little bit of metadata. Process A writes that serialized blob into shared memory. This step of "writing into shared memory" still involves O(N) work, where N is the size of the array (though you can have multiple threads do the memcpy in parallel and be limited just by memory bandwidth).
In the deserialization step, process B accesses the same shared memory blob (process A and B are on the same machine). It reads a tiny bit of metadata to figure out the type of the serialized object and shape and so on. Then it constructs a numpy array with the correct shape and type and with a pointer to the actual data in shared memory at the right offset. Therefore it doesn't need to touch all of the bytes of data, it just does O(1) work instead of O(N).
That's the basic idea. You can imagine generalizing this beyond numpy arrays, but it's most effective for objects that include large numerical data (e.g., objects that include numpy arrays).
There are a bunch of little details to get right, e.g., serializing directly into shared memory instead of creating a serialized copy in process A and then copying it into shared memory. Doing the write into shared memory in parallel with a bunch of threads. Getting the deserialization right. You also have to make sure that the starting addresses of the numpy arrays are 64-byte aligned (if memory serves) so that you don't accidentally trigger a copy later on.
EDIT: I edited the above to add more detail.