OPQ: Compressing Deep Neural Networks with One-shot Pruning-Quantization

As Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) usually are overparameterized and have millions of weight parameters, it is challenging to deploy these large DNN models on resource-constrained hardware platforms, e.g., smartphones. Numerous network compression methods such as pruning and quantization are proposed to reduce the model size significantly, of which the key is to find suitable compression allocation (e.g., pruning sparsity and quantization codebook) of each layer. Existing solutions obtain the compression allocation in an iterative/manual fashion while finetuning the compressed model, thus suffering from the efficiency issue. Different from the prior art, we propose a novel One-shot Pruning-Quantization (OPQ) in this paper, which analytically solves the compression allocation with pre-trained weight parameters only. During finetuning, the compression module is fixed and only weight parameters are updated. To our knowledge, OPQ is the first work that reveals pre-trained model is sufficient for solving pruning and quantization simultaneously, without any complex iterative/manual optimization at the finetuning stage. Furthermore, we propose a unified channel-wise quantization method that enforces all channels of each layer to share a common codebook, which leads to low bit-rate allocation without introducing extra overhead brought by traditional channel-wise quantization. Comprehensive experiments on ImageNet with AlexNet/MobileNet-V1/ResNet-50 show that our method improves accuracy and training efficiency while obtains significantly higher compression rates compared to the state-of-the-art.

Symmetry and Uncertainty-Aware Object SLAM for 6DoF Object Pose Estimation

We propose a keypoint-based object-level SLAM framework that can provide globally consistent 6DoF pose estimates for symmetric and asymmetric objects alike. To the best of our knowledge, our system is among the first to utilize the camera pose information from SLAM to provide prior knowledge for tracking keypoints on symmetric objects -- ensuring that new measurements are consistent with the current 3D scene. Moreover, our semantic keypoint network is trained to predict the Gaussian covariance for the keypoints that captures the true error of the prediction, and thus is not only useful as a weight for the residuals in the system's optimization problems, but also as a means to detect harmful statistical outliers without choosing a manual threshold. Experiments show that our method provides competitive performance to the state of the art in 6DoF object pose estimation, and at a real-time speed. Our code, pre-trained models, and keypoint labels are available https://github.com/rpng/suo_slam.

Are Multimodal Transformers Robust to Missing Modality?

Multimodal data collected from the real world are often imperfect due to missing modalities. Therefore multimodal models that are robust against modal-incomplete data are highly preferred. Recently, Transformer models have shown great success in processing multimodal data. However, existing work has been limited to either architecture designs or pre-training strategies; whether Transformer models are naturally robust against missing-modal data has rarely been investigated. In this paper, we present the first-of-its-kind work to comprehensively investigate the behavior of Transformers in the presence of modal-incomplete data. Unsurprising, we find Transformer models are sensitive to missing modalities while different modal fusion strategies will significantly affect the robustness. What surprised us is that the optimal fusion strategy is dataset dependent even for the same Transformer model; there does not exist a universal strategy that works in general cases. Based on these findings, we propose a principle method to improve the robustness of Transformer models by automatically searching for an optimal fusion strategy regarding input data. Experimental validations on three benchmarks support the superior performance of the proposed method.

Multi-Scale Adaptive Network for Single Image Denoising

Multi-scale architectures have shown effectiveness in a variety of tasks including single image denoising, thanks to appealing cross-scale complementarity. However, existing methods treat different scale features equally without considering their scale-specific characteristics, i.e., the within-scale characteristics are ignored. In this paper, we reveal this missing piece for multi-scale architecture design and accordingly propose a novel Multi-Scale Adaptive Network (MSANet) for single image denoising. To be specific, MSANet simultaneously embraces the within-scale characteristics and the cross-scale complementarity thanks to three novel neural blocks, i.e., adaptive feature block (AFeB), adaptive multi-scale block (AMB), and adaptive fusion block (AFuB). In brief, AFeB is designed to adaptively select details and filter noises, which is highly expected for fine-grained features. AMB could enlarge the receptive field and aggregate the multi-scale information, which is designed to satisfy the demands of both fine- and coarse-grained features. AFuB devotes to adaptively sampling and transferring the features from one scale to another scale, which is used to fuse the features with varying characteristics from coarse to fine. Extensive experiments on both three real and six synthetic noisy image datasets show the superiority of MSANet compared with 12 methods.

Description Logic EL++ Embeddings with Intersectional Closure

Many ontologies, in particular in the biomedical domain, are based on the Description Logic EL++. Several efforts have been made to interpret and exploit EL++ ontologies by distributed representation learning. Specifically, concepts within EL++ theories have been represented as n-balls within an n-dimensional embedding space. However, the intersectional closure is not satisfied when using n-balls to represent concepts because the intersection of two n-balls is not an n-ball. This leads to challenges when measuring the distance between concepts and inferring equivalence between concepts. To this end, we developed EL Box Embedding (ELBE) to learn Description Logic EL++ embeddings using axis-parallel boxes. We generate specially designed box-based geometric constraints from EL++ axioms for model training. Since the intersection of boxes remains as a box, the intersectional closure is satisfied. We report extensive experimental results on three datasets and present a case study to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.

Deep Learning for Spatiotemporal Modeling of Urbanization

Urbanization has a strong impact on the health and wellbeing of populations across the world. Predictive spatial modeling of urbanization therefore can be a useful tool for effective public health planning. Many spatial urbanization models have been developed using classic machine learning and numerical modeling techniques. However, deep learning with its proven capacity to capture complex spatiotemporal phenomena has not been applied to urbanization modeling. Here we explore the capacity of deep spatial learning for the predictive modeling of urbanization. We treat numerical geospatial data as images with pixels and channels, and enrich the dataset by augmentation, in order to leverage the high capacity of deep learning. Our resulting model can generate end-to-end multi-variable urbanization predictions, and outperforms a state-of-the-art classic machine learning urbanization model in preliminary comparisons.

Understanding the factors driving the opioid epidemic using machine learning

In recent years, the US has experienced an opioid epidemic with an unprecedented number of drugs overdose deaths. Research finds such overdose deaths are linked to neighborhood-level traits, thus providing opportunity to identify effective interventions. Typically, techniques such as Ordinary Least Squares (OLS) or Maximum Likelihood Estimation (MLE) are used to document neighborhood-level factors significant in explaining such adverse outcomes. These techniques are, however, less equipped to ascertain non-linear relationships between confounding factors. Hence, in this study we apply machine learning based techniques to identify opioid risks of neighborhoods in Delaware and explore the correlation of these factors using Shapley Additive explanations (SHAP). We discovered that the factors related to neighborhoods environment, followed by education and then crime, were highly correlated with higher opioid risk. We also explored the change in these correlations over the years to understand the changing dynamics of the epidemic. Furthermore, we discovered that, as the epidemic has shifted from legal (i.e., prescription opioids) to illegal (e.g.,heroin and fentanyl) drugs in recent years, the correlation of environment, crime and health related variables with the opioid risk has increased significantly while the correlation of economic and socio-demographic variables has decreased. The correlation of education related factors has been higher from the start and has increased slightly in recent years suggesting a need for increased awareness about the opioid epidemic.

Out-of-domain Generalization from a Single Source: A Uncertainty Quantification Approach

We study a worst-case scenario in generalization: Out-of-domain generalization from a single source. The goal is to learn a robust model from a single source and expect it to generalize over many unknown distributions. This challenging problem has been seldom investigated while existing solutions suffer from various limitations such as the ignorance of uncertainty assessment and label augmentation. In this paper, we propose uncertainty-guided domain generalization to tackle the aforementioned limitations. The key idea is to augment the source capacity in both feature and label spaces, while the augmentation is guided by uncertainty assessment. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work to (1) quantify the generalization uncertainty from a single source and (2) leverage it to guide both feature and label augmentation for robust generalization. The model training and deployment are effectively organized in a Bayesian meta-learning framework. We conduct extensive comparisons and ablation study to validate our approach. The results prove our superior performance in a wide scope of tasks including image classification, semantic segmentation, text classification, and speech recognition.

Accelerated MRI Reconstruction with Separable and Enhanced Low-Rank Hankel Regularization

The combination of the sparse sampling and the low-rank structured matrix reconstruction has shown promising performance, enabling a significant reduction of the magnetic resonance imaging data acquisition time. However, the low-rank structured approaches demand considerable memory consumption and are time-consuming due to a noticeable number of matrix operations performed on the huge-size block Hankel-like matrix. In this work, we proposed a novel framework to utilize the low-rank property but meanwhile to achieve faster reconstructions and promising results. The framework allows us to enforce the low-rankness of Hankel matrices constructing from 1D vectors instead of 2D matrices from 1D vectors and thus avoid the construction of huge block Hankel matrix for 2D k-space matrices. Moreover, under this framework, we can easily incorporate other information, such as the smooth phase of the image and the low-rankness in the parameter dimension, to further improve the image quality. We built and validated two models for parallel and parameter magnetic resonance imaging experiments, respectively. Our retrospective in-vivo results indicate that the proposed approaches enable faster reconstructions than the state-of-the-art approaches, e.g., about 8x faster than STDLRSPIRiT, and faithful removal of undersampling artifacts.

Unsupervised Neural Rendering for Image Hazing

Image hazing aims to render a hazy image from a given clean one, which could be applied to a variety of practical applications such as gaming, filming, photographic filtering, and image dehazing. To generate plausible haze, we study two less-touched but challenging problems in hazy image rendering, namely, i) how to estimate the transmission map from a single image without auxiliary information, and ii) how to adaptively learn the airlight from exemplars, i.e., unpaired real hazy images. To this end, we propose a neural rendering method for image hazing, dubbed as HazeGEN. To be specific, HazeGEN is a knowledge-driven neural network which estimates the transmission map by leveraging a new prior, i.e., there exists the structure similarity (e.g., contour and luminance) between the transmission map and the input clean image. To adaptively learn the airlight, we build a neural module based on another new prior, i.e., the rendered hazy image and the exemplar are similar in the airlight distribution. To the best of our knowledge, this could be the first attempt to deeply rendering hazy images in an unsupervised fashion. Comparing with existing haze generation methods, HazeGEN renders the hazy images in an unsupervised, learnable, and controllable manner, thus avoiding the labor-intensive efforts in paired data collection and the domain-shift issue in haze generation. Extensive experiments show the promising performance of our method comparing with some baselines in both qualitative and quantitative comparisons. The code will be released on GitHub after acceptance.