We consider two less-emphasized temporal properties of video: 1. Temporal cues are fine-grained; 2. Temporal modeling needs reasoning. To tackle both problems at once, we exploit approximated bilinear modules (ABMs) for temporal modeling. There are two main points making the modules effective: two-layer MLPs can be seen as a constraint approximation of bilinear operations, thus can be used to construct deep ABMs in existing CNNs while reusing pretrained parameters; frame features can be divided into static and dynamic parts because of visual repetition in adjacent frames, which enables temporal modeling to be more efficient. Multiple ABM variants and implementations are investigated, from high performance to high efficiency. Specifically, we show how two-layer subnets in CNNs can be converted to temporal bilinear modules by adding an auxiliary-branch. Besides, we introduce snippet sampling and shifting inference to boost sparse-frame video classification performance. Extensive ablation studies are conducted to show the effectiveness of proposed techniques. Our models can outperform most state-of-the-art methods on Something-Something v1 and v2 datasets without Kinetics pretraining, and are also competitive on other YouTube-like action recognition datasets. Our code is available on https://github.com/zhuxinqimac/abm-pytorch.
Latent traversal is a popular approach to visualize the disentangled latent representations. Given a bunch of variations in a single unit of the latent representation, it is expected that there is a change in a single factor of variation of the data while others are fixed. However, this impressive experimental observation is rarely explicitly encoded in the objective function of learning disentangled representations. This paper defines the variation predictability of latent disentangled representations. Given image pairs generated by latent codes varying in a single dimension, this varied dimension could be closely correlated with these image pairs if the representation is well disentangled. Within an adversarial generation process, we encourage variation predictability by maximizing the mutual information between latent variations and corresponding image pairs. We further develop an evaluation metric that does not rely on the ground-truth generative factors to measure the disentanglement of latent representations. The proposed variation predictability is a general constraint that is applicable to the VAE and GAN frameworks for boosting disentanglement of latent representations. Experiments show that the proposed variation predictability correlates well with existing ground-truth-required metrics and the proposed algorithm is effective for disentanglement learning.
This paper focuses on channel pruning for semantic segmentation networks. There are a large number of works to compress and accelerate deep neural networks in the classification task (e.g., ResNet-50 on ImageNet), but they cannot be straightforwardly applied to the semantic segmentation network that involves an implicit multi-task learning problem. To boost the segmentation performance, the backbone of semantic segmentation network is often pre-trained on a large scale classification dataset (e.g., ImageNet), and then optimized on the desired segmentation dataset. Hence to identify the redundancy in segmentation networks, we present a multi-task channel pruning approach. The importance of each convolution filter w.r.t the channel of an arbitrary layer will be simultaneously determined by the classification and segmentation tasks. In addition, we develop an alternative scheme for optimizing importance scores of filters in the entire network. Experimental results on several benchmarks illustrate the superiority of the proposed algorithm over the state-of-the-art pruning methods. Notably, we can obtain an about $2\times$ FLOPs reduction on DeepLabv3 with only an about $1\%$ mIoU drop on the PASCAL VOC 2012 dataset and an about $1.3\%$ mIoU drop on Cityscapes dataset, respectively.
Video style transfer techniques inspire many exciting applications on mobile devices. However, their efficiency and stability are still far from satisfactory. To boost the transfer stability across frames, optical flow is widely adopted, despite its high computational complexity, e.g. occupying over 97% inference time. This paper proposes to learn a lightweight video style transfer network via knowledge distillation paradigm. We adopt two teacher networks, one of which takes optical flow during inference while the other does not. The output difference between these two teacher networks highlights the improvements made by optical flow, which is then adopted to distill the target student network. Furthermore, a low-rank distillation loss is employed to stabilize the output of student network by mimicking the rank of input videos. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our student network without an optical flow module is still able to generate stable video and runs much faster than the teacher network.
Strong passwords are fundamental to the security of password-based user authentication systems. In recent years, much effort has been made to evaluate password strength or to generate strong passwords. Unfortunately, the usability or memorability of the strong passwords has been largely neglected. In this paper, we aim to bridge the gap between strong password generation and the usability of strong passwords. We propose to automatically generate textual password mnemonics, i.e., natural language sentences, which are intended to help users better memorize passwords. We introduce \textit{DeepMnemonic}, a deep attentive encoder-decoder framework which takes a password as input and then automatically generates a mnemonic sentence for the password. We conduct extensive experiments to evaluate DeepMnemonic on the real-world data sets. The experimental results demonstrate that DeepMnemonic outperforms a well-known baseline for generating semantically meaningful mnemonic sentences. Moreover, the user study further validates that the generated mnemonic sentences by DeepMnemonic are useful in helping users memorize strong passwords.
Neural Architecture Search (NAS) refers to automatically design the architecture. We propose an hourglass-inspired approach (HourNAS) for this problem that is motivated by the fact that the effects of the architecture often proceed from the vital few blocks. Acting like the narrow neck of an hourglass, vital blocks in the guaranteed path from the input to the output of a deep neural network restrict the information flow and influence the network accuracy. The other blocks occupy the major volume of the network and determine the overall network complexity, corresponding to the bulbs of an hourglass. To achieve an extremely fast NAS while preserving the high accuracy, we propose to identify the vital blocks and make them the priority in the architecture search. The search space of those non-vital blocks is further shrunk to only cover the candidates that are affordable under the computational resource constraints. Experimental results on the ImageNet show that only using 3 hours (0.1 days) with one GPU, our HourNAS can search an architecture that achieves a 77.0% Top-1 accuracy, which outperforms the state-of-the-art methods.
The challenges of high intra-class variance yet low inter-class fluctuations in fine-grained visual categorization are more severe with few labeled samples, \textit{i.e.,} Fine-Grained categorization problems under the Few-Shot setting (FGFS). High-order features are usually developed to uncover subtle differences between sub-categories in FGFS, but they are less effective in handling the high intra-class variance. In this paper, we propose a Target-Oriented Alignment Network (TOAN) to investigate the fine-grained relation between the target query image and support classes. The feature of each support image is transformed to match the query ones in the embedding feature space, which reduces the disparity explicitly within each category. Moreover, different from existing FGFS approaches devise the high-order features over the global image with less explicit consideration of discriminative parts, we generate discriminative fine-grained features by integrating compositional concept representations to global second-order pooling. Extensive experiments are conducted on four fine-grained benchmarks to demonstrate the effectiveness of TOAN compared with the state-of-the-art models.
Neural architecture search (NAS) aims to automatically design deep neural networks of satisfactory performance. Wherein, architecture performance predictor is critical to efficiently value an intermediate neural architecture. But for the training of this predictor, a number of neural architectures and their corresponding real performance often have to be collected. In contrast with classical performance predictor optimized in a fully supervised way, this paper suggests a semi-supervised assessor of neural architectures. We employ an auto-encoder to discover meaningful representations of neural architectures. Taking each neural architecture as an individual instance in the search space, we construct a graph to capture their intrinsic similarities, where both labeled and unlabeled architectures are involved. A graph convolutional neural network is introduced to predict the performance of architectures based on the learned representations and their relation modeled by the graph. Extensive experimental results on the NAS-Benchmark-101 dataset demonstrated that our method is able to make a significant reduction on the required fully trained architectures for finding efficient architectures.
Model quantization is a widely used technique to compress and accelerate deep neural network (DNN) inference, especially when deploying to edge or IoT devices with limited computation capacity and power consumption budget. The uniform bit width quantization across all the layers is usually sub-optimal and the exploration of hybrid quantization for different layers is vital for efficient deep compression. In this paper, we employ the meta learning method to automatically realize low-bit hybrid quantization of neural networks. A MetaQuantNet, together with a Quantization function, are trained to generate the quantized weights for the target DNN. Then, we apply a genetic algorithm to search the best hybrid quantization policy that meets compression constraints. With the best searched quantization policy, we subsequently retrain or finetune to further improve the performance of the quantized target network. Extensive experiments demonstrate the performance of searched hybrid quantization scheme surpass that of uniform bitwidth counterpart. Compared to the existing reinforcement learning (RL) based hybrid quantization search approach that relies on tedious explorations, our meta learning approach is more efficient and effective for any compression requirements since the MetaQuantNet only needs be trained once.