NaturalInversion: Data-Free Image Synthesis Improving Real-World Consistency

We introduce NaturalInversion, a novel model inversion-based method to synthesize images that agrees well with the original data distribution without using real data. In NaturalInversion, we propose: (1) a Feature Transfer Pyramid which uses enhanced image prior of the original data by combining the multi-scale feature maps extracted from the pre-trained classifier, (2) a one-to-one approach generative model where only one batch of images are synthesized by one generator to bring the non-linearity to optimization and to ease the overall optimizing process, (3) learnable Adaptive Channel Scaling parameters which are end-to-end trained to scale the output image channel to utilize the original image prior further. With our NaturalInversion, we synthesize images from classifiers trained on CIFAR-10/100 and show that our images are more consistent with original data distribution than prior works by visualization and additional analysis. Furthermore, our synthesized images outperform prior works on various applications such as knowledge distillation and pruning, demonstrating the effectiveness of our proposed method.

CRU: A Novel Neural Architecture for Improving the Predictive Performance of Time-Series Data

The time-series forecasting (TSF) problem is a traditional problem in the field of artificial intelligence. Models such as Recurrent Neural Network (RNN), Long Short Term Memory (LSTM), and GRU (Gate Recurrent Units) have contributed to improving the predictive accuracy of TSF. Furthermore, model structures have been proposed to combine time-series decomposition methods, such as seasonal-trend decomposition using Loess (STL) to ensure improved predictive accuracy. However, because this approach is learned in an independent model for each component, it cannot learn the relationships between time-series components. In this study, we propose a new neural architecture called a correlation recurrent unit (CRU) that can perform time series decomposition within a neural cell and learn correlations (autocorrelation and correlation) between each decomposition component. The proposed neural architecture was evaluated through comparative experiments with previous studies using five univariate time-series datasets and four multivariate time-series data. The results showed that long- and short-term predictive performance was improved by more than 10%. The experimental results show that the proposed CRU is an excellent method for TSF problems compared to other neural architectures.

CoVA: Exploiting Compressed-Domain Analysis to Accelerate Video Analytics

Modern retrospective analytics systems leverage cascade architecture to mitigate bottleneck for computing deep neural networks (DNNs). However, the existing cascades suffer two limitations: (1) decoding bottleneck is either neglected or circumvented, paying significant compute and storage cost for pre-processing; and (2) the systems are specialized for temporal queries and lack spatial query support. This paper presents CoVA, a novel cascade architecture that splits the cascade computation between compressed domain and pixel domain to address the decoding bottleneck, supporting both temporal and spatial queries. CoVA cascades analysis into three major stages where the first two stages are performed in compressed domain while the last one in pixel domain. First, CoVA detects occurrences of moving objects (called blobs) over a set of compressed frames (called tracks). Then, using the track results, CoVA prudently selects a minimal set of frames to obtain the label information and only decode them to compute the full DNNs, alleviating the decoding bottleneck. Lastly, CoVA associates tracks with labels to produce the final analysis results on which users can process both temporal and spatial queries. Our experiments demonstrate that CoVA offers 4.8x throughput improvement over modern cascade systems, while imposing modest accuracy loss.