We propose a lightweight CPU network based on the MKLDNN acceleration strategy, named PP-LCNet, which improves the performance of lightweight models on multiple tasks. This paper lists technologies which can improve network accuracy while the latency is almost constant. With these improvements, the accuracy of PP-LCNet can greatly surpass the previous network structure with the same inference time for classification. As shown in Figure 1, it outperforms the most state-of-the-art models. And for downstream tasks of computer vision, it also performs very well, such as object detection, semantic segmentation, etc. All our experiments are implemented based on PaddlePaddle. Code and pretrained models are available at PaddleClas.
Optical Character Recognition (OCR) systems have been widely used in various of application scenarios. Designing an OCR system is still a challenging task. In previous work, we proposed a practical ultra lightweight OCR system (PP-OCR) to balance the accuracy against the efficiency. In order to improve the accuracy of PP-OCR and keep high efficiency, in this paper, we propose a more robust OCR system, i.e. PP-OCRv2. We introduce bag of tricks to train a better text detector and a better text recognizer, which include Collaborative Mutual Learning (CML), CopyPaste, Lightweight CPUNetwork (LCNet), Unified-Deep Mutual Learning (U-DML) and Enhanced CTCLoss. Experiments on real data show that the precision of PP-OCRv2 is 7% higher than PP-OCR under the same inference cost. It is also comparable to the server models of the PP-OCR which uses ResNet series as backbones. All of the above mentioned models are open-sourced and the code is available in the GitHub repository PaddleOCR which is powered by PaddlePaddle.
Being effective and efficient is essential to an object detector for practical use. To meet these two concerns, we comprehensively evaluate a collection of existing refinements to improve the performance of PP-YOLO while almost keep the infer time unchanged. This paper will analyze a collection of refinements and empirically evaluate their impact on the final model performance through incremental ablation study. Things we tried that didn't work will also be discussed. By combining multiple effective refinements, we boost PP-YOLO's performance from 45.9% mAP to 49.5% mAP on COCO2017 test-dev. Since a significant margin of performance has been made, we present PP-YOLOv2. In terms of speed, PP-YOLOv2 runs in 68.9FPS at 640x640 input size. Paddle inference engine with TensorRT, FP16-precision, and batch size = 1 further improves PP-YOLOv2's infer speed, which achieves 106.5 FPS. Such a performance surpasses existing object detectors with roughly the same amount of parameters (i.e., YOLOv4-CSP, YOLOv5l). Besides, PP-YOLOv2 with ResNet101 achieves 50.3% mAP on COCO2017 test-dev. Source code is at https://github.com/PaddlePaddle/PaddleDetection.
Recently, research efforts have been concentrated on revealing how pre-trained model makes a difference in neural network performance. Self-supervision and semi-supervised learning technologies have been extensively explored by the community and are proven to be of great potential in obtaining a powerful pre-trained model. However, these models require huge training costs (i.e., hundreds of millions of images or training iterations). In this paper, we propose to improve existing baseline networks via knowledge distillation from off-the-shelf pre-trained big powerful models. Different from existing knowledge distillation frameworks which require student model to be consistent with both soft-label generated by teacher model and hard-label annotated by humans, our solution performs distillation by only driving prediction of the student model consistent with that of the teacher model. Therefore, our distillation setting can get rid of manually labeled data and can be trained with extra unlabeled data to fully exploit capability of teacher model for better learning. We empirically find that such simple distillation settings perform extremely effective, for example, the top-1 accuracy on ImageNet-1k validation set of MobileNetV3-large and ResNet50-D can be significantly improved from 75.2% to 79% and 79.1% to 83%, respectively. We have also thoroughly analyzed what are dominant factors that affect the distillation performance and how they make a difference. Extensive downstream computer vision tasks, including transfer learning, object detection and semantic segmentation, can significantly benefit from the distilled pretrained models. All our experiments are implemented based on PaddlePaddle, codes and a series of improved pretrained models with ssld suffix are available in PaddleClas.
Attention-based Encoder-Decoder has the effective architecture for neural machine translation (NMT), which typically relies on recurrent neural networks (RNN) to build the blocks that will be lately called by attentive reader during the decoding process. This design of encoder yields relatively uniform composition on source sentence, despite the gating mechanism employed in encoding RNN. On the other hand, we often hope the decoder to take pieces of source sentence at varying levels suiting its own linguistic structure: for example, we may want to take the entity name in its raw form while taking an idiom as a perfectly composed unit. Motivated by this demand, we propose Multi-channel Encoder (MCE), which enhances encoding components with different levels of composition. More specifically, in addition to the hidden state of encoding RNN, MCE takes 1) the original word embedding for raw encoding with no composition, and 2) a particular design of external memory in Neural Turing Machine (NTM) for more complex composition, while all three encoding strategies are properly blended during decoding. Empirical study on Chinese-English translation shows that our model can improve by 6.52 BLEU points upon a strong open source NMT system: DL4MT1. On the WMT14 English- French task, our single shallow system achieves BLEU=38.8, comparable with the state-of-the-art deep models.