Towards Robust and Efficient Cloud-Edge Elastic Model Adaptation via Selective Entropy Distillation

The conventional deep learning paradigm often involves training a deep model on a server and then deploying the model or its distilled ones to resource-limited edge devices. Usually, the models shall remain fixed once deployed (at least for some period) due to the potential high cost of model adaptation for both the server and edge sides. However, in many real-world scenarios, the test environments may change dynamically (known as distribution shifts), which often results in degraded performance. Thus, one has to adapt the edge models promptly to attain promising performance. Moreover, with the increasing data collected at the edge, this paradigm also fails to further adapt the cloud model for better performance. To address these, we encounter two primary challenges: 1) the edge model has limited computation power and may only support forward propagation; 2) the data transmission budget between cloud and edge devices is limited in latency-sensitive scenarios. In this paper, we establish a Cloud-Edge Elastic Model Adaptation (CEMA) paradigm in which the edge models only need to perform forward propagation and the edge models can be adapted online. In our CEMA, to reduce the communication burden, we devise two criteria to exclude unnecessary samples from uploading to the cloud, i.e., dynamic unreliable and low-informative sample exclusion. Based on the uploaded samples, we update and distribute the affine parameters of normalization layers by distilling from the stronger foundation model to the edge model with a sample replay strategy. Extensive experimental results on ImageNet-C and ImageNet-R verify the effectiveness of our CEMA.

Automatic Subspace Evoking for Efficient Neural Architecture Search

Neural Architecture Search (NAS) aims to automatically find effective architectures from a predefined search space. However, the search space is often extremely large. As a result, directly searching in such a large search space is non-trivial and also very time-consuming. To address the above issues, in each search step, we seek to limit the search space to a small but effective subspace to boost both the search performance and search efficiency. To this end, we propose a novel Neural Architecture Search method via Automatic Subspace Evoking (ASE-NAS) that finds promising architectures in automatically evoked subspaces. Specifically, we first perform a global search, i.e., automatic subspace evoking, to evoke/find a good subspace from a set of candidates. Then, we perform a local search within the evoked subspace to find an effective architecture. More critically, we further boost search performance by taking well-designed/searched architectures as the initial candidate subspaces. Extensive experiments show that our ASE-NAS not only greatly reduces the search cost but also finds better architectures than state-of-the-art methods in various benchmark search spaces.

Time-aware Graph Embedding: A temporal smoothness and task-oriented approach

Knowledge graph embedding, which aims to learn the low-dimensional representations of entities and relationships, has attracted considerable research efforts recently. However, most knowledge graph embedding methods focus on the structural relationships in fixed triples while ignoring the temporal information. Currently, existing time-aware graph embedding methods only focus on the factual plausibility, while ignoring the temporal smoothness which models the interactions between a fact and its contexts, and thus can capture fine-granularity temporal relationships. This leads to the limited performance of embedding related applications. To solve this problem, this paper presents a Robustly Time-aware Graph Embedding (RTGE) method by incorporating temporal smoothness. Two major innovations of our paper are presented here. At first, RTGE integrates a measure of temporal smoothness in the learning process of the time-aware graph embedding. Via the proposed additional smoothing factor, RTGE can preserve both structural information and evolutionary patterns of a given graph. Secondly, RTGE provides a general task-oriented negative sampling strategy associated with temporally-aware information, which further improves the adaptive ability of the proposed algorithm and plays an essential role in obtaining superior performance in various tasks. Extensive experiments conducted on multiple benchmark tasks show that RTGE can increase performance in entity/relationship/temporal scoping prediction tasks.