Memory-aware Scheduling for Complex Wired Networks with Iterative Graph Optimization

Memory-aware network scheduling is becoming increasingly important for deep neural network (DNN) inference on resource-constrained devices. However, due to the complex cell-level and network-level topologies, memory-aware scheduling becomes very challenging. While previous algorithms all suffer from poor scalability, in this paper, we propose an efficient memory-aware scheduling framework based on iterative computation graph optimization. Our framework features an iterative graph fusion algorithm that simplifies the computation graph while preserving the scheduling optimality. We further propose an integer linear programming formulation together with topology-aware variable pruning to schedule the simplified graph efficiently. We evaluate our method against prior-art algorithms on different networks and demonstrate that our method outperforms existing techniques in all the benchmarks, reducing the peak memory footprint by 13.4%, and achieving better scalability for networks with complex network-level topologies.

Falcon: Accelerating Homomorphically Encrypted Convolutions for Efficient Private Mobile Network Inference

Efficient networks, e.g., MobileNetV2, EfficientNet, etc, achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) accuracy with lightweight computation. However, existing homomorphic encryption (HE)-based two-party computation (2PC) frameworks are not optimized for these networks and suffer from a high inference overhead. We observe the inefficiency mainly comes from the packing algorithm, which ignores the computation characteristics and the communication bottleneck of homomorphically encrypted depthwise convolutions. Therefore, in this paper, we propose Falcon, an effective dense packing algorithm for HE-based 2PC frameworks. Falcon features a zero-aware greedy packing algorithm and a communication-aware operator tiling strategy to improve the packing density for depthwise convolutions. Compared to SOTA HE-based 2PC frameworks, e.g., CrypTFlow2, Iron and Cheetah, Falcon achieves more than 15.6x, 5.1x and 1.8x latency reduction, respectively, at operator level. Meanwhile, at network level, Falcon allows for 1.4% and 4.2% accuracy improvement over Cheetah on CIFAR-100 and TinyImagenet datasets with iso-communication, respecitvely.

Stroke Extraction of Chinese Character Based on Deep Structure Deformable Image Registration

Stroke extraction of Chinese characters plays an important role in the field of character recognition and generation. The most existing character stroke extraction methods focus on image morphological features. These methods usually lead to errors of cross strokes extraction and stroke matching due to rarely using stroke semantics and prior information. In this paper, we propose a deep learning-based character stroke extraction method that takes semantic features and prior information of strokes into consideration. This method consists of three parts: image registration-based stroke registration that establishes the rough registration of the reference strokes and the target as prior information; image semantic segmentation-based stroke segmentation that preliminarily separates target strokes into seven categories; and high-precision extraction of single strokes. In the stroke registration, we propose a structure deformable image registration network to achieve structure-deformable transformation while maintaining the stable morphology of single strokes for character images with complex structures. In order to verify the effectiveness of the method, we construct two datasets respectively for calligraphy characters and regular handwriting characters. The experimental results show that our method strongly outperforms the baselines. Code is available at https://github.com/MengLi-l1/StrokeExtraction.

Mixture-of-Supernets: Improving Weight-Sharing Supernet Training with Architecture-Routed Mixture-of-Experts

Weight-sharing supernet has become a vital component for performance estimation in the state-of-the-art (SOTA) neural architecture search (NAS) frameworks. Although supernet can directly generate different subnetworks without retraining, there is no guarantee for the quality of these subnetworks because of weight sharing. In NLP tasks such as machine translation and pre-trained language modeling, we observe that given the same model architecture, there is a large performance gap between supernet and training from scratch. Hence, supernet cannot be directly used and retraining is necessary after finding the optimal architectures. In this work, we propose mixture-of-supernets, a generalized supernet formulation where mixture-of-experts (MoE) is adopted to enhance the expressive power of the supernet model, with negligible training overhead. In this way, different subnetworks do not share the model weights directly, but through an architecture-based routing mechanism. As a result, model weights of different subnetworks are customized towards their specific architectures and the weight generation is learned by gradient descent. Compared to existing weight-sharing supernet for NLP, our method can minimize the retraining time, greatly improving training efficiency. In addition, the proposed method achieves the SOTA performance in NAS for building fast machine translation models, yielding better latency-BLEU tradeoff compared to HAT, state-of-the-art NAS for MT. We also achieve the SOTA performance in NAS for building memory-efficient task-agnostic BERT models, outperforming NAS-BERT and AutoDistil in various model sizes.

Frame-Event Alignment and Fusion Network for High Frame Rate Tracking

Most existing RGB-based trackers target low frame rate benchmarks of around 30 frames per second. This setting restricts the tracker's functionality in the real world, especially for fast motion. Event-based cameras as bioinspired sensors provide considerable potential for high frame rate tracking due to their high temporal resolution. However, event-based cameras cannot offer fine-grained texture information like conventional cameras. This unique complementarity motivates us to combine conventional frames and events for high frame rate object tracking under various challenging conditions. Inthispaper, we propose an end-to-end network consisting of multi-modality alignment and fusion modules to effectively combine meaningful information from both modalities at different measurement rates. The alignment module is responsible for cross-style and cross-frame-rate alignment between frame and event modalities under the guidance of the moving cues furnished by events. While the fusion module is accountable for emphasizing valuable features and suppressing noise information by the mutual complement between the two modalities. Extensive experiments show that the proposed approach outperforms state-of-the-art trackers by a significant margin in high frame rate tracking. With the FE240hz dataset, our approach achieves high frame rate tracking up to 240Hz.

ALT: An Automatic System for Long Tail Scenario Modeling

In this paper, we consider the problem of long tail scenario modeling with budget limitation, i.e., insufficient human resources for model training stage and limited time and computing resources for model inference stage. This problem is widely encountered in various applications, yet has received deficient attention so far. We present an automatic system named ALT to deal with this problem. Several efforts are taken to improve the algorithms used in our system, such as employing various automatic machine learning related techniques, adopting the meta learning philosophy, and proposing an essential budget-limited neural architecture search method, etc. Moreover, to build the system, many optimizations are performed from a systematic perspective, and essential modules are armed, making the system more feasible and efficient. We perform abundant experiments to validate the effectiveness of our system and demonstrate the usefulness of the critical modules in our system. Moreover, online results are provided, which fully verified the efficacy of our system.

EBSR: Enhanced Binary Neural Network for Image Super-Resolution

While the performance of deep convolutional neural networks for image super-resolution (SR) has improved significantly, the rapid increase of memory and computation requirements hinders their deployment on resource-constrained devices. Quantized networks, especially binary neural networks (BNN) for SR have been proposed to significantly improve the model inference efficiency but suffer from large performance degradation. We observe the activation distribution of SR networks demonstrates very large pixel-to-pixel, channel-to-channel, and image-to-image variation, which is important for high performance SR but gets lost during binarization. To address the problem, we propose two effective methods, including the spatial re-scaling as well as channel-wise shifting and re-scaling, which augments binary convolutions by retaining more spatial and channel-wise information. Our proposed models, dubbed EBSR, demonstrate superior performance over prior art methods both quantitatively and qualitatively across different datasets and different model sizes. Specifically, for x4 SR on Set5 and Urban100, EBSRlight improves the PSNR by 0.31 dB and 0.28 dB compared to SRResNet-E2FIF, respectively, while EBSR outperforms EDSR-E2FIF by 0.29 dB and 0.32 dB PSNR, respectively.

${S}^{2}$Net: Accurate Panorama Depth Estimation on Spherical Surface

Monocular depth estimation is an ambiguous problem, thus global structural cues play an important role in current data-driven single-view depth estimation methods. Panorama images capture the complete spatial information of their surroundings utilizing the equirectangular projection which introduces large distortion. This requires the depth estimation method to be able to handle the distortion and extract global context information from the image. In this paper, we propose an end-to-end deep network for monocular panorama depth estimation on a unit spherical surface. Specifically, we project the feature maps extracted from equirectangular images onto unit spherical surface sampled by uniformly distributed grids, where the decoder network can aggregate the information from the distortion-reduced feature maps. Meanwhile, we propose a global cross-attention-based fusion module to fuse the feature maps from skip connection and enhance the ability to obtain global context. Experiments are conducted on five panorama depth estimation datasets, and the results demonstrate that the proposed method substantially outperforms previous state-of-the-art methods. All related codes will be open-sourced in the upcoming days.

End to End Generative Meta Curriculum Learning For Medical Data Augmentation

Current medical image synthetic augmentation techniques rely on intensive use of generative adversarial networks (GANs). However, the nature of GAN architecture leads to heavy computational resources to produce synthetic images and the augmentation process requires multiple stages to complete. To address these challenges, we introduce a novel generative meta curriculum learning method that trains the task-specific model (student) end-to-end with only one additional teacher model. The teacher learns to generate curriculum to feed into the student model for data augmentation and guides the student to improve performance in a meta-learning style. In contrast to the generator and discriminator in GAN, which compete with each other, the teacher and student collaborate to improve the student's performance on the target tasks. Extensive experiments on the histopathology datasets show that leveraging our framework results in significant and consistent improvements in classification performance.

Conditioned Generative Transformers for Histopathology Image Synthetic Augmentation

Deep learning networks have demonstrated state-of-the-art performance on medical image analysis tasks. However, the majority of the works rely heavily on abundantly labeled data, which necessitates extensive involvement of domain experts. Vision transformer (ViT) based generative adversarial networks (GANs) recently demonstrated superior potential in general image synthesis, yet are less explored for histopathology images. In this paper, we address these challenges by proposing a pure ViT-based conditional GAN model for histopathology image synthetic augmentation. To alleviate training instability and improve generation robustness, we first introduce a conditioned class projection method to facilitate class separation. We then implement a multi-loss weighing function to dynamically balance the losses between classification tasks. We further propose a selective augmentation mechanism to actively choose the appropriate generated images and bring additional performance improvements. Extensive experiments on the histopathology datasets show that leveraging our synthetic augmentation framework results in significant and consistent improvements in classification performance.