Reprogramming under constraints: Revisiting efficient and reliable transferability of lottery tickets

In the era of foundation models with huge pre-training budgets, the downstream tasks have been shifted to the narrative of efficient and fast adaptation. For classification-based tasks in the domain of computer vision, the two most efficient approaches have been linear probing (LP) and visual prompting/reprogramming (VP); the former aims to learn a classifier in the form of a linear head on the features extracted by the pre-trained model, while the latter maps the input data to the domain of the source data on which the model was originally pre-trained on. Although extensive studies have demonstrated the differences between LP and VP in terms of downstream performance, we explore the capabilities of the two aforementioned methods via the sparsity axis: (a) Data sparsity: the impact of few-shot adaptation and (b) Model sparsity: the impact of lottery tickets (LT). We demonstrate that LT are not universal reprogrammers, i.e., for certain target datasets, reprogramming an LT yields significantly lower performance than the reprogrammed dense model although their corresponding upstream performance is similar. Further, we demonstrate that the calibration of dense models is always superior to that of their lottery ticket counterparts under both LP and VP regimes. Our empirical study opens a new avenue of research into VP for sparse models and encourages further understanding of the performance beyond the accuracy achieved by VP under constraints of sparsity. Code and logs can be accessed at \url{https://github.com/landskape-ai/Reprogram_LT}.

Scaling the Number of Tasks in Continual Learning

Standard gradient descent algorithms applied to sequences of tasks are known to produce catastrophic forgetting in deep neural networks. When trained on a new task in a sequence, the model updates its parameters on the current task, forgetting past knowledge. This article explores scenarios where we scale the number of tasks in a finite environment. Those scenarios are composed of a long sequence of tasks with reoccurring data. We show that in such setting, stochastic gradient descent can learn, progress, and converge to a solution that according to existing literature needs a continual learning algorithm. In other words, we show that the model performs knowledge retention and accumulation without specific memorization mechanisms. We propose a new experimentation framework, SCoLe (Scaling Continual Learning), to study the knowledge retention and accumulation of algorithms in potentially infinite sequences of tasks. To explore this setting, we performed a large number of experiments on sequences of 1,000 tasks to better understand this new family of settings. We also propose a slight modifications to the vanilla stochastic gradient descent to facilitate continual learning in this setting. The SCoLe framework represents a good simulation of practical training environments with reoccurring situations and allows the study of convergence behavior in long sequences. Our experiments show that previous results on short scenarios cannot always be extrapolated to longer scenarios.

Beyond the Imitation Game: Quantifying and extrapolating the capabilities of language models

Language models demonstrate both quantitative improvement and new qualitative capabilities with increasing scale. Despite their potentially transformative impact, these new capabilities are as yet poorly characterized. In order to inform future research, prepare for disruptive new model capabilities, and ameliorate socially harmful effects, it is vital that we understand the present and near-future capabilities and limitations of language models. To address this challenge, we introduce the Beyond the Imitation Game benchmark (BIG-bench). BIG-bench currently consists of 204 tasks, contributed by 442 authors across 132 institutions. Task topics are diverse, drawing problems from linguistics, childhood development, math, common-sense reasoning, biology, physics, social bias, software development, and beyond. BIG-bench focuses on tasks that are believed to be beyond the capabilities of current language models. We evaluate the behavior of OpenAI's GPT models, Google-internal dense transformer architectures, and Switch-style sparse transformers on BIG-bench, across model sizes spanning millions to hundreds of billions of parameters. In addition, a team of human expert raters performed all tasks in order to provide a strong baseline. Findings include: model performance and calibration both improve with scale, but are poor in absolute terms (and when compared with rater performance); performance is remarkably similar across model classes, though with benefits from sparsity; tasks that improve gradually and predictably commonly involve a large knowledge or memorization component, whereas tasks that exhibit "breakthrough" behavior at a critical scale often involve multiple steps or components, or brittle metrics; social bias typically increases with scale in settings with ambiguous context, but this can be improved with prompting.

APP: Anytime Progressive Pruning

With the latest advances in deep learning, there has been a lot of focus on the online learning paradigm due to its relevance in practical settings. Although many methods have been investigated for optimal learning settings in scenarios where the data stream is continuous over time, sparse networks training in such settings have often been overlooked. In this paper, we explore the problem of training a neural network with a target sparsity in a particular case of online learning: the anytime learning at macroscale paradigm (ALMA). We propose a novel way of progressive pruning, referred to as \textit{Anytime Progressive Pruning} (APP); the proposed approach significantly outperforms the baseline dense and Anytime OSP models across multiple architectures and datasets under short, moderate, and long-sequence training. Our method, for example, shows an improvement in accuracy of $\approx 7\%$ and a reduction in the generalization gap by $\approx 22\%$, while being $\approx 1/3$ rd the size of the dense baseline model in few-shot restricted imagenet training. We further observe interesting nonmonotonic transitions in the generalization gap in the high number of megabatches-based ALMA. The code and experiment dashboards can be accessed at \url{https://github.com/landskape-ai/Progressive-Pruning} and \url{https://wandb.ai/landskape/APP}, respectively.

Rotate to Attend: Convolutional Triplet Attention Module

Benefiting from the capability of building inter-dependencies among channels or spatial locations, attention mechanisms have been extensively studied and broadly used in a variety of computer vision tasks recently. In this paper, we investigate light-weight but effective attention mechanisms and present triplet attention, a novel method for computing attention weights by capturing cross-dimension interaction using a three-branch structure. For an input tensor, triplet attention builds inter-dimensional dependencies by the rotation operation followed by residual transformations and encodes inter-channel and spatial information with negligible computational overhead. Our method is simple as well as efficient and can be easily plugged into classic backbone networks as an add-on module. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our method on various challenging tasks including image classification on ImageNet-1k and object detection on MSCOCO and PASCAL VOC datasets. Furthermore, we provide extensive in-sight into the performance of triplet attention by visually inspecting the GradCAM and GradCAM++ results. The empirical evaluation of our method supports our intuition on the importance of capturing dependencies across dimensions when computing attention weights. Code for this paper can be publicly accessed at https://github.com/LandskapeAI/triplet-attention

Mish: A Self Regularized Non-Monotonic Neural Activation Function

The concept of non-linearity in a Neural Network is introduced by an activation function which serves an integral role in the training and performance evaluation of the network. Over the years of theoretical research, many activation functions have been proposed, however, only a few are widely used in mostly all applications which include ReLU (Rectified Linear Unit), TanH (Tan Hyperbolic), Sigmoid, Leaky ReLU and Swish. In this work, a novel neural activation function called as Mish is proposed. The experiments show that Mish tends to work better than both ReLU and Swish along with other standard activation functions in many deep networks across challenging datasets. For instance, in Squeeze Excite Net- 18 for CIFAR 100 classification, the network with Mish had an increase in Top-1 test accuracy by 0.494% and 1.671% as compared to the same network with Swish and ReLU respectively. The similarity to Swish along with providing a boost in performance and its simplicity in implementation makes it easier for researchers and developers to use Mish in their Neural Network Models.

Advanced Image Processing for Astronomical Images

Image Processing in Astronomy is a major field of research and involves a lot of techniques pertaining to improve analyzing the properties of the celestial objects or obtaining preliminary inference from the image data. In this paper, we provide a comprehensive case study of advanced image processing techniques applied to Astronomical Galaxy Images for improved analysis, accurate inferences and faster analysis.

Image Processing on IOPA Radiographs: A comprehensive case study on Apical Periodontitis

With the recent advancements in Image Processing Techniques and development of new robust computer vision algorithms, new areas of research within Medical Diagnosis and Biomedical Engineering are picking up pace. This paper provides a comprehensive in-depth case study of Image Processing, Feature Extraction and Analysis of Apical Periodontitis diagnostic cases in IOPA (Intra Oral Peri-Apical) Radiographs, a common case in oral diagnostic pipeline. This paper provides a detailed analytical approach towards improving the diagnostic procedure with improved and faster results with higher accuracy targeting to eliminate True Negative and False Positive cases.