Differentiable NAS Framework and Application to Ads CTR Prediction

Neural architecture search (NAS) methods aim to automatically find the optimal deep neural network (DNN) architecture as measured by a given objective function, typically some combination of task accuracy and inference efficiency. For many areas, such as computer vision and natural language processing, this is a critical, yet still time consuming process. New NAS methods have recently made progress in improving the efficiency of this process. We implement an extensible and modular framework for Differentiable Neural Architecture Search (DNAS) to help solve this problem. We include an overview of the major components of our codebase and how they interact, as well as a section on implementing extensions to it (including a sample), in order to help users adopt our framework for their applications across different categories of deep learning models. To assess the capabilities of our methodology and implementation, we apply DNAS to the problem of ads click-through rate (CTR) prediction, arguably the highest-value and most worked on AI problem at hyperscalers today. We develop and tailor novel search spaces to a Deep Learning Recommendation Model (DLRM) backbone for CTR prediction, and report state-of-the-art results on the Criteo Kaggle CTR prediction dataset.

Image2Point: 3D Point-Cloud Understanding with Pretrained 2D ConvNets

3D point-clouds and 2D images are different visual representations of the physical world. While human vision can understand both representations, computer vision models designed for 2D image and 3D point-cloud understanding are quite different. Our paper investigates the potential for transferability between these two representations by empirically investigating whether this approach works, what factors affect the transfer performance, and how to make it work even better. We discovered that we can indeed use the same neural net model architectures to understand both images and point-clouds. Moreover, we can transfer pretrained weights from image models to point-cloud models with minimal effort. Specifically, based on a 2D ConvNet pretrained on an image dataset, we can transfer the image model to a point-cloud model by \textit{inflating} 2D convolutional filters to 3D then finetuning its input, output, and optionally normalization layers. The transferred model can achieve competitive performance on 3D point-cloud classification, indoor and driving scene segmentation, even beating a wide range of point-cloud models that adopt task-specific architectures and use a variety of tricks.

Data-Efficient Language-Supervised Zero-Shot Learning with Self-Distillation

Traditional computer vision models are trained to predict a fixed set of predefined categories. Recently, natural language has been shown to be a broader and richer source of supervision that provides finer descriptions to visual concepts than supervised "gold" labels. Previous works, such as CLIP, use a simple pretraining task of predicting the pairings between images and text captions. CLIP, however, is data hungry and requires more than 400M image text pairs for training. We propose a data-efficient contrastive distillation method that uses soft labels to learn from noisy image-text pairs. Our model transfers knowledge from pretrained image and sentence encoders and achieves strong performance with only 3M image text pairs, 133x smaller than CLIP. Our method exceeds the previous SoTA of general zero-shot learning on ImageNet 21k+1k by 73% relatively with a ResNet50 image encoder and DeCLUTR text encoder. We also beat CLIP by 10.5% relatively on zero-shot evaluation on Google Open Images (19,958 classes).

You Only Group Once: Efficient Point-Cloud Processing with Token Representation and Relation Inference Module

3D point-cloud-based perception is a challenging but crucial computer vision task. A point-cloud consists of a sparse, unstructured, and unordered set of points. To understand a point-cloud, previous point-based methods, such as PointNet++, extract visual features through hierarchically aggregation of local features. However, such methods have several critical limitations: 1) Such methods require several sampling and grouping operations, which slow down the inference speed. 2) Such methods spend an equal amount of computation on each points in a point-cloud, though many of points are redundant. 3) Such methods aggregate local features together through downsampling, which leads to information loss and hurts the perception performance. To overcome these challenges, we propose a novel, simple, and elegant deep learning model called YOGO (You Only Group Once). Compared with previous methods, YOGO only needs to sample and group a point-cloud once, so it is very efficient. Instead of operating on points, YOGO operates on a small number of tokens, each of which summarizes the point features in a sub-region. This allows us to avoid computing on the redundant points and thus boosts efficiency.Moreover, YOGO preserves point-wise features by projecting token features to point features although the computation is performed on tokens. This avoids information loss and can improve point-wise perception performance. We conduct thorough experiments to demonstrate that YOGO achieves at least 3.0x speedup over point-based baselines while delivering competitive classification and segmentation performance on the ModelNet, ShapeNetParts and S3DIS datasets.

Improving Context-Based Meta-Reinforcement Learning with Self-Supervised Trajectory Contrastive Learning

Meta-reinforcement learning typically requires orders of magnitude more samples than single task reinforcement learning methods. This is because meta-training needs to deal with more diverse distributions and train extra components such as context encoders. To address this, we propose a novel self-supervised learning task, which we named Trajectory Contrastive Learning (TCL), to improve meta-training. TCL adopts contrastive learning and trains a context encoder to predict whether two transition windows are sampled from the same trajectory. TCL leverages the natural hierarchical structure of context-based meta-RL and makes minimal assumptions, allowing it to be generally applicable to context-based meta-RL algorithms. It accelerates the training of context encoders and improves meta-training overall. Experiments show that TCL performs better or comparably than a strong meta-RL baseline in most of the environments on both meta-RL MuJoCo (5 of 6) and Meta-World benchmarks (44 out of 50).

Unbiased Teacher for Semi-Supervised Object Detection

Semi-supervised learning, i.e., training networks with both labeled and unlabeled data, has made significant progress recently. However, existing works have primarily focused on image classification tasks and neglected object detection which requires more annotation effort. In this work, we revisit the Semi-Supervised Object Detection (SS-OD) and identify the pseudo-labeling bias issue in SS-OD. To address this, we introduce Unbiased Teacher, a simple yet effective approach that jointly trains a student and a gradually progressing teacher in a mutually-beneficial manner. Together with a class-balance loss to downweight overly confident pseudo-labels, Unbiased Teacher consistently improved state-of-the-art methods by significant margins on COCO-standard, COCO-additional, and VOC datasets. Specifically, Unbiased Teacher achieves 6.8 absolute mAP improvements against state-of-the-art method when using 1% of labeled data on MS-COCO, achieves around 10 mAP improvements against the supervised baseline when using only 0.5, 1, 2% of labeled data on MS-COCO.

FBWave: Efficient and Scalable Neural Vocoders for Streaming Text-To-Speech on the Edge

Nowadays more and more applications can benefit from edge-based text-to-speech (TTS). However, most existing TTS models are too computationally expensive and are not flexible enough to be deployed on the diverse variety of edge devices with their equally diverse computational capacities. To address this, we propose FBWave, a family of efficient and scalable neural vocoders that can achieve optimal performance-efficiency trade-offs for different edge devices. FBWave is a hybrid flow-based generative model that combines the advantages of autoregressive and non-autoregressive models. It produces high quality audio and supports streaming during inference while remaining highly computationally efficient. Our experiments show that FBWave can achieve similar audio quality to WaveRNN while reducing MACs by 40x. More efficient variants of FBWave can achieve up to 109x fewer MACs while still delivering acceptable audio quality. Audio demos are available at https://bichenwu09.github.io/vocoder_demos.

FP-NAS: Fast Probabilistic Neural Architecture Search

Differential Neural Architecture Search (NAS) requires all layer choices to be held in memory simultaneously; this limits the size of both search space and final architecture. In contrast, Probabilistic NAS, such as PARSEC, learns a distribution over high-performing architectures, and uses only as much memory as needed to train a single model. Nevertheless, it needs to sample many architectures, making it computationally expensive for searching in an extensive space. To solve these problems, we propose a sampling method adaptive to the distribution entropy, drawing more samples to encourage explorations at the beginning, and reducing samples as learning proceeds. Furthermore, to search fast in the multi-variate space, we propose a coarse-to-fine strategy by using a factorized distribution at the beginning which can reduce the number of architecture parameters by over an order of magnitude.We call this method Fast Probabilistic NAS (FP-NAS). Compared with PARSEC, it can sample 64% fewer architectures and search 2.1x faster. Compared with FBNetV2, FP-NAS is 1.9x - 3.6x faster, and the searched models outperform FBNetV2 models on ImageNet. FP-NAS allows us to expand the giant FBNetV2 space to be wider (i.e. larger channel choices) and deeper (i.e. more blocks), while adding Split-Attention block and enabling the search over the number of splits. When searching a model of size 0.4G FLOPS, FP-NAS is 132x faster than EfficientNet, and the searched FP-NAS-L0 model outperforms EfficientNet-B0 by 0.6% accuracy. Without using any architecture surrogate or scaling tricks, we directly search large models up to 1.0G FLOPS. Our FP-NAS-L2 model with simple distillation outperforms BigNAS-XL with advanced inplace distillation by 0.7% accuracy with less FLOPS.