Enhancing Accuracy in Deep Learning Using Random Matrix Theory

In this study, we explore the applications of random matrix theory (RMT) in the training of deep neural networks (DNNs), focusing on layer pruning to simplify DNN architecture and loss landscape. RMT, recently used to address overfitting in deep learning, enables the examination of DNN's weight layer spectra. We use these techniques to optimally determine the number of singular values to be removed from the weight layers of a DNN during training via singular value decomposition (SVD). This process aids in DNN simplification and accuracy enhancement, as evidenced by training simple DNN models on the MNIST and Fashion MNIST datasets. Our method can be applied to any fully connected or convolutional layer of a pretrained DNN, decreasing the layer's parameters and simplifying the DNN architecture while preserving or even enhancing the model's accuracy. By discarding small singular values based on RMT criteria, the accuracy of the test set remains consistent, facilitating more efficient DNN training without compromising performance. We provide both theoretical and empirical evidence supporting our claim that the elimination of small singular values based on RMT does not negatively impact the DNN's accuracy. Our results offer valuable insights into the practical application of RMT for the creation of more efficient and accurate deep-learning models.

Solving Two-Player General-Sum Games Between Swarms

Hamilton-Jacobi-Isaacs (HJI) PDEs are the governing equations for the two-player general-sum games. Unlike Reinforcement Learning (RL) methods, which are data-intensive methods for learning value function, learning HJ PDEs provide a guaranteed convergence to the Nash Equilibrium value of the game when it exists. However, a caveat is that solving HJ PDEs becomes intractable when the state dimension increases. To circumvent the curse of dimensionality (CoD), physics-informed machine learning methods with supervision can be used and have been shown to be effective in generating equilibrial policies in two-player general-sum games. In this work, we extend the existing work on agent-level two-player games to a two-player swarm-level game, where two sub-swarms play a general-sum game. We consider the \textit{Kolmogorov forward equation} as the dynamic model for the evolution of the densities of the swarms. Results show that policies generated from the physics-informed neural network (PINN) result in a higher payoff than a Nash Double Deep Q-Network (Nash DDQN) agent and have comparable performance with numerical solvers.

SMPLer-X: Scaling Up Expressive Human Pose and Shape Estimation

Expressive human pose and shape estimation (EHPS) unifies body, hands, and face motion capture with numerous applications. Despite encouraging progress, current state-of-the-art methods still depend largely on confined training datasets. In this work, we investigate scaling up EHPS towards the first generalist foundation model (dubbed SMPLer-X), with up to ViT-Huge as the backbone and training with up to 4.5M instances from diverse data sources. With big data and the large model, SMPLer-X exhibits strong performance across diverse test benchmarks and excellent transferability to even unseen environments. 1) For the data scaling, we perform a systematic investigation on 32 EHPS datasets, encompassing a wide range of scenarios that a model trained on any single dataset cannot handle. More importantly, capitalizing on insights obtained from the extensive benchmarking process, we optimize our training scheme and select datasets that lead to a significant leap in EHPS capabilities. 2) For the model scaling, we take advantage of vision transformers to study the scaling law of model sizes in EHPS. Moreover, our finetuning strategy turn SMPLer-X into specialist models, allowing them to achieve further performance boosts. Notably, our foundation model SMPLer-X consistently delivers state-of-the-art results on seven benchmarks such as AGORA (107.2 mm NMVE), UBody (57.4 mm PVE), EgoBody (63.6 mm PVE), and EHF (62.3 mm PVE without finetuning).

CPPF: A contextual and post-processing-free model for automatic speech recognition

ASR systems have become increasingly widespread in recent years. However, their textual outputs often require post-processing tasks before they can be practically utilized. To address this issue, we draw inspiration from the multifaceted capabilities of LLMs and Whisper, and focus on integrating multiple ASR text processing tasks related to speech recognition into the ASR model. This integration not only shortens the multi-stage pipeline, but also prevents the propagation of cascading errors, resulting in direct generation of post-processed text. In this study, we focus on ASR-related processing tasks, including Contextual ASR and multiple ASR post processing tasks. To achieve this objective, we introduce the CPPF model, which offers a versatile and highly effective alternative to ASR processing. CPPF seamlessly integrates these tasks without any significant loss in recognition performance.

Pixel-Aware Stable Diffusion for Realistic Image Super-resolution and Personalized Stylization

Realistic image super-resolution (Real-ISR) aims to reproduce perceptually realistic image details from a low-quality input. The commonly used adversarial training based Real-ISR methods often introduce unnatural visual artifacts and fail to generate realistic textures for natural scene images. The recently developed generative stable diffusion models provide a potential solution to Real-ISR with pre-learned strong image priors. However, the existing methods along this line either fail to keep faithful pixel-wise image structures or resort to extra skipped connections to reproduce details, which requires additional training in image space and limits their extension to other related tasks in latent space such as image stylization. In this work, we propose a pixel-aware stable diffusion (PASD) network to achieve robust Real-ISR as well as personalized stylization. In specific, a pixel-aware cross attention module is introduced to enable diffusion models perceiving image local structures in pixel-wise level, while a degradation removal module is used to extract degradation insensitive features to guide the diffusion process together with image high level information. By simply replacing the base diffusion model with a personalized one, our method can generate diverse stylized images without the need to collect pairwise training data. PASD can be easily integrated into existing diffusion models such as Stable Diffusion. Experiments on Real-ISR and personalized stylization demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed approach. The source code and models can be found at \url{https://github.com/yangxy/PASD}.

Delta-LoRA: Fine-Tuning High-Rank Parameters with the Delta of Low-Rank Matrices

In this paper, we present Delta-LoRA, which is a novel parameter-efficient approach to fine-tune large language models (LLMs). In contrast to LoRA and other low-rank adaptation methods such as AdaLoRA, Delta-LoRA not only updates the low-rank matrices $\bA$ and $\bB$, but also propagate the learning to the pre-trained weights $\bW$ via updates utilizing the delta of the product of two low-rank matrices ($\bA^{(t+1)}\bB^{(t+1)} - \bA^{(t)}\bB^{(t)}$). Such a strategy effectively addresses the limitation that the incremental update of low-rank matrices is inadequate for learning representations capable for downstream tasks. Moreover, as the update of $\bW$ does not need to compute the gradients of $\bW$ and store their momentums, Delta-LoRA shares comparable memory requirements and computational costs with LoRA. Extensive experiments show that Delta-LoRA significantly outperforms existing low-rank adaptation methods. We further support these results with comprehensive analyses that underscore the effectiveness of Delta-LoRA.

An Anchor-Point Based Image-Model for Room Impulse Response Simulation with Directional Source Radiation and Sensor Directivity Patterns

The image model method has been widely used to simulate room impulse responses and the endeavor to adapt this method to different applications has also piqued great interest over the last few decades. This paper attempts to extend the image model method and develops an anchor-point-image-model (APIM) approach as a solution for simulating impulse responses by including both the source radiation and sensor directivity patterns. To determine the orientations of all the virtual sources, anchor points are introduced to real sources, which subsequently lead to the determination of the orientations of the virtual sources. An algorithm is developed to generate room impulse responses with APIM by taking into account the directional pattern functions, factional time delays, as well as the computational complexity. The developed model and algorithms can be used in various acoustic problems to simulate room acoustics and improve and evaluate processing algorithms.

Neural Interactive Keypoint Detection

This work proposes an end-to-end neural interactive keypoint detection framework named Click-Pose, which can significantly reduce more than 10 times labeling costs of 2D keypoint annotation compared with manual-only annotation. Click-Pose explores how user feedback can cooperate with a neural keypoint detector to correct the predicted keypoints in an interactive way for a faster and more effective annotation process. Specifically, we design the pose error modeling strategy that inputs the ground truth pose combined with four typical pose errors into the decoder and trains the model to reconstruct the correct poses, which enhances the self-correction ability of the model. Then, we attach an interactive human-feedback loop that allows receiving users' clicks to correct one or several predicted keypoints and iteratively utilizes the decoder to update all other keypoints with a minimum number of clicks (NoC) for efficient annotation. We validate Click-Pose in in-domain, out-of-domain scenes, and a new task of keypoint adaptation. For annotation, Click-Pose only needs 1.97 and 6.45 NoC@95 (at precision 95%) on COCO and Human-Art, reducing 31.4% and 36.3% efforts than the SOTA model (ViTPose) with manual correction, respectively. Besides, without user clicks, Click-Pose surpasses the previous end-to-end model by 1.4 AP on COCO and 3.0 AP on Human-Art. The code is available at https://github.com/IDEA-Research/Click-Pose.

Uncovering User Interest from Biased and Noised Watch Time in Video Recommendation

In the video recommendation, watch time is commonly adopted as an indicator of user interest. However, watch time is not only influenced by the matching of users' interests but also by other factors, such as duration bias and noisy watching. Duration bias refers to the tendency for users to spend more time on videos with longer durations, regardless of their actual interest level. Noisy watching, on the other hand, describes users taking time to determine whether they like a video or not, which can result in users spending time watching videos they do not like. Consequently, the existence of duration bias and noisy watching make watch time an inadequate label for indicating user interest. Furthermore, current methods primarily address duration bias and ignore the impact of noisy watching, which may limit their effectiveness in uncovering user interest from watch time. In this study, we first analyze the generation mechanism of users' watch time from a unified causal viewpoint. Specifically, we considered the watch time as a mixture of the user's actual interest level, the duration-biased watch time, and the noisy watch time. To mitigate both the duration bias and noisy watching, we propose Debiased and Denoised watch time Correction (D$^2$Co), which can be divided into two steps: First, we employ a duration-wise Gaussian Mixture Model plus frequency-weighted moving average for estimating the bias and noise terms; then we utilize a sensitivity-controlled correction function to separate the user interest from the watch time, which is robust to the estimation error of bias and noise terms. The experiments on two public video recommendation datasets and online A/B testing indicate the effectiveness of the proposed method.

Exploring Winograd Convolution for Cost-effective Neural Network Fault Tolerance

Winograd is generally utilized to optimize convolution performance and computational efficiency because of the reduced multiplication operations, but the reliability issues brought by winograd are usually overlooked. In this work, we observe the great potential of winograd convolution in improving neural network (NN) fault tolerance. Based on the observation, we evaluate winograd convolution fault tolerance comprehensively from different granularities ranging from models, layers, and operation types for the first time. Then, we explore the use of inherent fault tolerance of winograd convolution for cost-effective NN protection against soft errors. Specifically, we mainly investigate how winograd convolution can be effectively incorporated with classical fault-tolerant design approaches including triple modular redundancy (TMR), fault-aware retraining, and constrained activation functions. According to our experiments, winograd convolution can reduce the fault-tolerant design overhead by 55.77\% on average without any accuracy loss compared to standard convolution, and further reduce the computing overhead by 17.24\% when the inherent fault tolerance of winograd convolution is considered. When it is applied on fault-tolerant neural networks enhanced with fault-aware retraining and constrained activation functions, the resulting model accuracy generally shows significant improvement in presence of various faults.