The Effect of Network Width on Stochastic Gradient Descent and Generalization: an Empirical Study

We investigate how the final parameters found by stochastic gradient descent are influenced by over-parameterization. We generate families of models by increasing the number of channels in a base network, and then perform a large hyper-parameter search to study how the test error depends on learning rate, batch size, and network width. We find that the optimal SGD hyper-parameters are determined by a "normalized noise scale," which is a function of the batch size, learning rate, and initialization conditions. In the absence of batch normalization, the optimal normalized noise scale is directly proportional to width. Wider networks, with their higher optimal noise scale, also achieve higher test accuracy. These observations hold for MLPs, ConvNets, and ResNets, and for two different parameterization schemes ("Standard" and "NTK"). We observe a similar trend with batch normalization for ResNets. Surprisingly, since the largest stable learning rate is bounded, the largest batch size consistent with the optimal normalized noise scale decreases as the width increases.

Unsupervised Data Augmentation

Despite its success, deep learning still needs large labeled datasets to succeed. Data augmentation has shown much promise in alleviating the need for more labeled data, but it so far has mostly been applied in supervised settings and achieved limited gains. In this work, we propose to apply data augmentation to unlabeled data in a semi-supervised learning setting. Our method, named Unsupervised Data Augmentation or UDA, encourages the model predictions to be consistent between an unlabeled example and an augmented unlabeled example. Unlike previous methods that use random noise such as Gaussian noise or dropout noise, UDA has a small twist in that it makes use of harder and more realistic noise generated by state-of-the-art data augmentation methods. This small twist leads to substantial improvements on six language tasks and three vision tasks even when the labeled set is extremely small. For example, on the IMDb text classification dataset, with only 20 labeled examples, UDA outperforms the state-of-the-art model trained on 25,000 labeled examples. On standard semi-supervised learning benchmarks, CIFAR-10 with 4,000 examples and SVHN with 1,000 examples, UDA outperforms all previous approaches and reduces more than $30\%$ of the error rates of state-of-the-art methods: going from 7.66% to 5.27% and from 3.53% to 2.46% respectively. UDA also works well on datasets that have a lot of labeled data. For example, on ImageNet, with 1.3M extra unlabeled data, UDA improves the top-1/top-5 accuracy from 78.28/94.36% to 79.04/94.45% when compared to AutoAugment.

Attention Augmented Convolutional Networks

Convolutional networks have been the paradigm of choice in many computer vision applications. The convolution operation however has a significant weakness in that it only operates on a local neighborhood, thus missing global information. Self-attention, on the other hand, has emerged as a recent advance to capture long range interactions, but has mostly been applied to sequence modeling and generative modeling tasks. In this paper, we consider the use of self-attention for discriminative visual tasks as an alternative to convolutions. We introduce a novel two-dimensional relative self-attention mechanism that proves competitive in replacing convolutions as a stand-alone computational primitive for image classification. We find in control experiments that the best results are obtained when combining both convolutions and self-attention. We therefore propose to augment convolutional operators with this self-attention mechanism by concatenating convolutional feature maps with a set of feature maps produced via self-attention. Extensive experiments show that Attention Augmentation leads to consistent improvements in image classification on ImageNet and object detection on COCO across many different models and scales, including ResNets and a state-of-the art mobile constrained network, while keeping the number of parameters similar. In particular, our method achieves a $1.3\%$ top-1 accuracy improvement on ImageNet classification over a ResNet50 baseline and outperforms other attention mechanisms for images such as Squeeze-and-Excitation. It also achieves an improvement of 1.4 mAP in COCO Object Detection on top of a RetinaNet baseline.

SpecAugment: A Simple Data Augmentation Method for Automatic Speech Recognition

We present SpecAugment, a simple data augmentation method for speech recognition. SpecAugment is applied directly to the feature inputs of a neural network (i.e., filter bank coefficients). The augmentation policy consists of warping the features, masking blocks of frequency channels, and masking blocks of time steps. We apply SpecAugment on Listen, Attend and Spell networks for end-to-end speech recognition tasks. We achieve state-of-the-art performance on the LibriSpeech 960h and Swichboard 300h tasks, outperforming all prior work. On LibriSpeech, we achieve 6.8% WER on test-other without the use of a language model, and 5.8% WER with shallow fusion with a language model. This compares to the previous state-of-the-art hybrid system of 7.5% WER. For Switchboard, we achieve 7.2%/14.6% on the Switchboard/CallHome portion of the Hub5'00 test set without the use of a language model, and 6.8%/14.1% with shallow fusion, which compares to the previous state-of-the-art hybrid system at 8.3%/17.3% WER.

NAS-FPN: Learning Scalable Feature Pyramid Architecture for Object Detection

Current state-of-the-art convolutional architectures for object detection are manually designed. Here we aim to learn a better architecture of feature pyramid network for object detection. We adopt Neural Architecture Search and discover a new feature pyramid architecture in a novel scalable search space covering all cross-scale connections. The discovered architecture, named NAS-FPN, consists of a combination of top-down and bottom-up connections to fuse features across scales. NAS-FPN, combined with various backbone models in the RetinaNet framework, achieves better accuracy and latency tradeoff compared to state-of-the-art object detection models. NAS-FPN improves mobile detection accuracy by 2 AP compared to state-of-the-art SSDLite with MobileNetV2 model in [32] and achieves 48.3 AP which surpasses Mask R-CNN [10] detection accuracy with less computation time.

Soft Conditional Computation

Conditional computation aims to increase the size and accuracy of a network, at a small increase in inference cost. Previous hard-routing models explicitly route the input to a subset of experts. We propose soft conditional computation, which, in contrast, utilizes all experts while still permitting efficient inference through parameter routing. Concretely, for a given convolutional layer, we wish to compute a linear combination of $n$ experts $\alpha_1 \cdot (W_1 * x) + \ldots + \alpha_n \cdot (W_n * x)$, where $\alpha_1, \ldots, \alpha_n$ are functions of the input learned through gradient descent. A straightforward evaluation requires $n$ convolutions. We propose an equivalent form of the above computation, $(\alpha_1 W_1 + \ldots + \alpha_n W_n) * x$, which requires only a single convolution. We demonstrate the efficacy of our method, named CondConv, by scaling up the MobileNetV1, MobileNetV2, and ResNet-50 model architectures to achieve higher accuracy while retaining efficient inference. On the ImageNet classification dataset, CondConv improves the top-1 validation accuracy of the MobileNetV1(0.5x) model from 63.8% to 71.6% while only increasing inference cost by 27%. On COCO object detection, CondConv improves the minival mAP of a MobileNetV1(1.0x) SSD model from 20.3 to 22.4 with just a 4% increase in inference cost.

The Evolved Transformer

Recent works have highlighted the strengths of the Transformer architecture for dealing with sequence tasks. At the same time, neural architecture search has advanced to the point where it can outperform human-designed models. The goal of this work is to use architecture search to find a better Transformer architecture. We first construct a large search space inspired by the recent advances in feed-forward sequential models and then run evolutionary architecture search, seeding our initial population with the Transformer. To effectively run this search on the computationally expensive WMT 2014 English-German translation task, we develop the progressive dynamic hurdles method, which allows us to dynamically allocate more resources to more promising candidate models. The architecture found in our experiments - the Evolved Transformer - demonstrates consistent improvement over the Transformer on four well-established language tasks: WMT 2014 English-German, WMT 2014 English-French, WMT 2014 English-Czech and LM1B. At big model size, the Evolved Transformer is twice as efficient as the Transformer in FLOPS without loss in quality. At a much smaller - mobile-friendly - model size of ~7M parameters, the Evolved Transformer outperforms the Transformer by 0.7 BLEU on WMT'14 English-German.

Transformer-XL: Attentive Language Models Beyond a Fixed-Length Context

Transformer networks have a potential of learning longer-term dependency, but are limited by a fixed-length context in the setting of language modeling. As a solution, we propose a novel neural architecture, Transformer-XL, that enables Transformer to learn dependency beyond a fixed length without disrupting temporal coherence. Concretely, it consists of a segment-level recurrence mechanism and a novel positional encoding scheme. Our method not only enables capturing longer-term dependency, but also resolves the problem of context fragmentation. As a result, Transformer-XL learns dependency that is about 80% longer than RNNs and 450% longer than vanilla Transformers, achieves better performance on both short and long sequences, and is up to 1,800+ times faster than vanilla Transformer during evaluation. Additionally, we improve the state-of-the-art (SoTA) results of bpc/perplexity from 1.06 to 0.99 on enwiki8, from 1.13 to 1.08 on text8, from 20.5 to 18.3 on WikiText-103, from 23.7 to 21.8 on One Billion Word, and from 55.3 to 54.5 on Penn Treebank (without finetuning). Our code, pretrained models, and hyperparameters are available in both Tensorflow and PyTorch.

GPipe: Efficient Training of Giant Neural Networks using Pipeline Parallelism

GPipe is a scalable pipeline parallelism library that enables learning of giant deep neural networks. It partitions network layers across accelerators and pipelines execution to achieve high hardware utilization. It leverages recomputation to minimize activation memory usage. For example, using partitions over 8 accelerators, it is able to train networks that are 25x larger, demonstrating its scalability. It also guarantees that the computed gradients remain consistent regardless of the number of partitions. It achieves an almost linear speed up without any changes in the model parameters: when using 4x more accelerators, training the same model is up to 3.5x faster. We train a 557 million parameters AmoebaNet model on ImageNet and achieve a new state-of-the-art 84.3% top-1 / 97.0% top-5 accuracy on ImageNet 2012 dataset. Finally, we use this learned model to finetune multiple popular image classification datasets and obtain competitive results, including pushing the CIFAR-10 accuracy to 99% and CIFAR-100 accuracy to 91.3%.