Emotion recognition in user-generated videos plays an important role in human-centered computing. Existing methods mainly employ traditional two-stage shallow pipeline, i.e. extracting visual and/or audio features and training classifiers. In this paper, we propose to recognize video emotions in an end-to-end manner based on convolutional neural networks (CNNs). Specifically, we develop a deep Visual-Audio Attention Network (VAANet), a novel architecture that integrates spatial, channel-wise, and temporal attentions into a visual 3D CNN and temporal attentions into an audio 2D CNN. Further, we design a special classification loss, i.e. polarity-consistent cross-entropy loss, based on the polarity-emotion hierarchy constraint to guide the attention generation. Extensive experiments conducted on the challenging VideoEmotion-8 and Ekman-6 datasets demonstrate that the proposed VAANet outperforms the state-of-the-art approaches for video emotion recognition. Our source code is released at: https://github.com/maysonma/VAANet.
Recent breakthroughs in Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) have fueled a growing demand for DNN chips. However, designing DNN chips is non-trivial because: (1) mainstream DNNs have millions of parameters and operations; (2) the large design space due to the numerous design choices of dataflows, processing elements, memory hierarchy, etc.; and (3) an algorithm/hardware co-design is needed to allow the same DNN functionality to have a different decomposition, which would require different hardware IPs to meet the application specifications. Therefore, DNN chips take a long time to design and require cross-disciplinary experts. To enable fast and effective DNN chip design, we propose AutoDNNchip - a DNN chip generator that can automatically generate both FPGA- and ASIC-based DNN chip implementation given DNNs from machine learning frameworks (e.g., PyTorch) for a designated application and dataset. Specifically, AutoDNNchip consists of two integrated enablers: (1) a Chip Predictor, built on top of a graph-based accelerator representation, which can accurately and efficiently predict a DNN accelerator's energy, throughput, and area based on the DNN model parameters, hardware configuration, technology-based IPs, and platform constraints; and (2) a Chip Builder, which can automatically explore the design space of DNN chips (including IP selection, block configuration, resource balancing, etc.), optimize chip design via the Chip Predictor, and then generate optimized synthesizable RTL to achieve the target design metrics. Experimental results show that our Chip Predictor's predicted performance differs from real-measured ones by < 10% when validated using 15 DNN models and 4 platforms (edge-FPGA/TPU/GPU and ASIC). Furthermore, accelerators generated by our AutoDNNchip can achieve better (up to 3.86X improvement) performance than that of expert-crafted state-of-the-art accelerators.
While increasingly deep networks are still in general desired for achieving state-of-the-art performance, for many specific inputs a simpler network might already suffice. Existing works exploited this observation by learning to skip convolutional layers in an input-dependent manner. However, we argue their binary decision scheme, i.e., either fully executing or completely bypassing one layer for a specific input, can be enhanced by introducing finer-grained, "softer" decisions. We therefore propose a Dynamic Fractional Skipping (DFS) framework. The core idea of DFS is to hypothesize layer-wise quantization (to different bitwidths) as intermediate "soft" choices to be made between fully utilizing and skipping a layer. For each input, DFS dynamically assigns a bitwidth to both weights and activations of each layer, where fully executing and skipping could be viewed as two "extremes" (i.e., full bitwidth and zero bitwidth). In this way, DFS can "fractionally" exploit a layer's expressive power during input-adaptive inference, enabling finer-grained accuracy-computational cost trade-offs. It presents a unified view to link input-adaptive layer skipping and input-adaptive hybrid quantization. Extensive experimental results demonstrate the superior tradeoff between computational cost and model expressive power (accuracy) achieved by DFS. More visualizations also indicate a smooth and consistent transition in the DFS behaviors, especially the learned choices between layer skipping and different quantizations when the total computational budgets vary, validating our hypothesis that layer quantization could be viewed as intermediate variants of layer skipping. Our source code and supplementary material are available at \link{https://github.com/Torment123/DFS}.
Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have been increasingly deployed to edge devices. Hence, many efforts have been made towards efficient CNN inference in resource-constrained platforms. This paper attempts to explore an orthogonal direction: how to conduct more energy-efficient training of CNNs, so as to enable on-device training. We strive to reduce the energy cost during training, by dropping unnecessary computations from three complementary levels: stochastic mini-batch dropping on the data level; selective layer update on the model level; and sign prediction for low-cost, low-precision back-propagation, on the algorithm level. Extensive simulations and ablation studies, with real energy measurements from an FPGA board, confirm the superiority of our proposed strategies and demonstrate remarkable energy savings for training. For example, when training ResNet-74 on CIFAR-10, we achieve aggressive energy savings of >90% and >60%, while incurring a top-1 accuracy loss of only about 2% and 1.2%, respectively. When training ResNet-110 on CIFAR-100, an over 84% training energy saving is achieved without degrading inference accuracy.
Deep neural networks suffer from performance decay when there is domain shift between the labeled source domain and unlabeled target domain, which motivates the research on domain adaptation (DA). Conventional DA methods usually assume that the labeled data is sampled from a single source distribution. However, in practice, labeled data may be collected from multiple sources, while naive application of the single-source DA algorithms may lead to suboptimal solutions. In this paper, we propose a novel multi-source distilling domain adaptation (MDDA) network, which not only considers the different distances among multiple sources and the target, but also investigates the different similarities of the source samples to the target ones. Specifically, the proposed MDDA includes four stages: (1) pre-train the source classifiers separately using the training data from each source; (2) adversarially map the target into the feature space of each source respectively by minimizing the empirical Wasserstein distance between source and target; (3) select the source training samples that are closer to the target to fine-tune the source classifiers; and (4) classify each encoded target feature by corresponding source classifier, and aggregate different predictions using respective domain weight, which corresponds to the discrepancy between each source and target. Extensive experiments are conducted on public DA benchmarks, and the results demonstrate that the proposed MDDA significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art approaches. Our source code is released at: https://github.com/daoyuan98/MDDA.
Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have been increasingly deployed to edge devices. Hence, many efforts have been made towards efficient CNN inference on resource-constrained platforms. This paper attempts to explore an orthogonal direction: how to conduct more energy-efficient training of CNNs, so as to enable on-device training? We strive to reduce the energy cost during training, by dropping unnecessary computations, from three complementary levels: stochastic mini-batch dropping on the data level; selective layer update on the model level; and sign prediction for low-cost, low-precision back-propagation, on the algorithm level. Extensive simulations and ablation studies, with real energy measurements from an FPGA board, confirm the superiority of our proposed strategies and demonstrate remarkable energy savings for training. For example, when training ResNet-74 on CIFAR-10, we achieve aggressive energy savings of >90% and >60%, while incurring a top-1 accuracy loss of only about 2% and 1.2%, respectively. When training ResNet-110 on CIFAR-100, an over 84% training energy saving is achieved without degrading inference accuracy.
Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have been increasingly deployed to edge devices. Hence, many efforts have been made towards efficient CNN inference on resource-constrained platforms. This paper attempts to explore an orthogonal direction: how to conduct more energy-efficient training of CNNs, so as to enable on-device training? We strive to reduce the energy cost during training, by dropping unnecessary computations, from three complementary levels: stochastic mini-batch dropping on the data level; selective layer update on the model level; and sign prediction for low-cost, low-precision back-propagation, on the algorithm level. Extensive simulations and ablation studies, with real energy measurements from an FPGA board, confirm the superiority of our proposed strategies and demonstrate remarkable energy savings for training. For example, when training ResNet-74 on CIFAR-10, we achieve aggressive energy savings of >90% and >60%, while incurring a top-1 accuracy loss of only about 2% and 1.2%, respectively. When training ResNet-110 on CIFAR-100, an over 84% training energy saving is achieved without degrading inference accuracy.
Simulation-to-real domain adaptation for semantic segmentation has been actively studied for various applications such as autonomous driving. Existing methods mainly focus on a single-source setting, which cannot easily handle a more practical scenario of multiple sources with different distributions. In this paper, we propose to investigate multi-source domain adaptation for semantic segmentation. Specifically, we design a novel framework, termed Multi-source Adversarial Domain Aggregation Network (MADAN), which can be trained in an end-to-end manner. First, we generate an adapted domain for each source with dynamic semantic consistency while aligning at the pixel-level cycle-consistently towards the target. Second, we propose sub-domain aggregation discriminator and cross-domain cycle discriminator to make different adapted domains more closely aggregated. Finally, feature-level alignment is performed between the aggregated domain and target domain while training the segmentation network. Extensive experiments from synthetic GTA and SYNTHIA to real Cityscapes and BDDS datasets demonstrate that the proposed MADAN model outperforms state-of-the-art approaches. Our source code is released at: https://github.com/Luodian/MADAN.
(Frankle & Carbin, 2019) shows that there exist winning tickets (small but critical subnetworks) for dense, randomly initialized networks, that can be trained alone to achieve comparable accuracies to the latter in a similar number of iterations. However, the identification of these winning tickets still requires the costly train-prune-retrain process, limiting their practical benefits. In this paper, we discover for the first time that the winning tickets can be identified at the very early training stage, which we term as early-bird (EB) tickets, via low-cost training schemes (e.g., early stopping and low-precision training) at large learning rates. Our finding of EB tickets is consistent with recently reported observations that the key connectivity patterns of neural networks emerge early. Furthermore, we propose a mask distance metric that can be used to identify EB tickets with low computational overhead, without needing to know the true winning tickets that emerge after the full training. Finally, we leverage the existence of EB tickets and the proposed mask distance to develop efficient training methods, which are achieved by first identifying EB tickets via low-cost schemes, and then continuing to train merely the EB tickets towards the target accuracy. Experiments based on various deep networks and datasets validate: 1) the existence of EB tickets, and the effectiveness of mask distance in efficiently identifying them; and 2) that the proposed efficient training via EB tickets can achieve up to 4.7x energy savings while maintaining comparable or even better accuracy, demonstrating a promising and easily adopted method for tackling cost-prohibitive deep network training.