DiM: Distilling Dataset into Generative Model

Dataset distillation reduces the network training cost by synthesizing small and informative datasets from large-scale ones. Despite the success of the recent dataset distillation algorithms, three drawbacks still limit their wider application: i). the synthetic images perform poorly on large architectures; ii). they need to be re-optimized when the distillation ratio changes; iii). the limited diversity restricts the performance when the distillation ratio is large. In this paper, we propose a novel distillation scheme to \textbf{D}istill information of large train sets \textbf{i}nto generative \textbf{M}odels, named DiM. Specifically, DiM learns to use a generative model to store the information of the target dataset. During the distillation phase, we minimize the differences in logits predicted by a models pool between real and generated images. At the deployment stage, the generative model synthesizes various training samples from random noises on the fly. Due to the simple yet effective designs, the trained DiM can be directly applied to different distillation ratios and large architectures without extra cost. We validate the proposed DiM across 4 datasets and achieve state-of-the-art results on all of them. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to achieve higher accuracy on complex architectures than simple ones, such as 75.1\% with ResNet-18 and 72.6\% with ConvNet-3 on ten images per class of CIFAR-10. Besides, DiM outperforms previous methods with 10\% $\sim$ 22\% when images per class are 1 and 10 on the SVHN dataset.

CRIN: Rotation-Invariant Point Cloud Analysis and Rotation Estimation via Centrifugal Reference Frame

Various recent methods attempt to implement rotation-invariant 3D deep learning by replacing the input coordinates of points with relative distances and angles. Due to the incompleteness of these low-level features, they have to undertake the expense of losing global information. In this paper, we propose the CRIN, namely Centrifugal Rotation-Invariant Network. CRIN directly takes the coordinates of points as input and transforms local points into rotation-invariant representations via centrifugal reference frames. Aided by centrifugal reference frames, each point corresponds to a discrete rotation so that the information of rotations can be implicitly stored in point features. Unfortunately, discrete points are far from describing the whole rotation space. We further introduce a continuous distribution for 3D rotations based on points. Furthermore, we propose an attention-based down-sampling strategy to sample points invariant to rotations. A relation module is adopted at last for reinforcing the long-range dependencies between sampled points and predicts the anchor point for unsupervised rotation estimation. Extensive experiments show that our method achieves rotation invariance, accurately estimates the object rotation, and obtains state-of-the-art results on rotation-augmented classification and part segmentation. Ablation studies validate the effectiveness of the network design.

DREAM: Efficient Dataset Distillation by Representative Matching

Dataset distillation aims to generate small datasets with little information loss as large-scale datasets for reducing storage and training costs. Recent state-of-the-art methods mainly constrain the sample generation process by matching synthetic images and the original ones regarding gradients, embedding distributions, or training trajectories. Although there are various matching objectives, currently the method for selecting original images is limited to naive random sampling. We argue that random sampling inevitably involves samples near the decision boundaries, which may provide large or noisy matching targets. Besides, random sampling cannot guarantee the evenness and diversity of the sample distribution. These factors together lead to large optimization oscillations and degrade the matching efficiency. Accordingly, we propose a novel matching strategy named as \textbf{D}ataset distillation by \textbf{RE}present\textbf{A}tive \textbf{M}atching (DREAM), where only representative original images are selected for matching. DREAM is able to be easily plugged into popular dataset distillation frameworks and reduce the matching iterations by 10 times without performance drop. Given sufficient training time, DREAM further provides significant improvements and achieves state-of-the-art performances.

Robust Robot Planning for Human-Robot Collaboration

In human-robot collaboration, the objectives of the human are often unknown to the robot. Moreover, even assuming a known objective, the human behavior is also uncertain. In order to plan a robust robot behavior, a key preliminary question is then: How to derive realistic human behaviors given a known objective? A major issue is that such a human behavior should itself account for the robot behavior, otherwise collaboration cannot happen. In this paper, we rely on Markov decision models, representing the uncertainty over the human objective as a probability distribution over a finite set of objective functions (inducing a distribution over human behaviors). Based on this, we propose two contributions: 1) an approach to automatically generate an uncertain human behavior (a policy) for each given objective function while accounting for possible robot behaviors; and 2) a robot planning algorithm that is robust to the above-mentioned uncertainties and relies on solving a partially observable Markov decision process (POMDP) obtained by reasoning on a distribution over human behaviors. A co-working scenario allows conducting experiments and presenting qualitative and quantitative results to evaluate our approach.

Colossal-Auto: Unified Automation of Parallelization and Activation Checkpoint for Large-scale Models

In recent years, large-scale models have demonstrated state-of-the-art performance across various domains. However, training such models requires various techniques to address the problem of limited computing power and memory on devices such as GPUs. Some commonly used techniques include pipeline parallelism, tensor parallelism, and activation checkpointing. While existing works have focused on finding efficient distributed execution plans (Zheng et al. 2022) and activation checkpoint scheduling (Herrmann et al. 2019, Beaumont et al. 2021}, there has been no method proposed to optimize these two plans jointly. Moreover, ahead-of-time compilation relies heavily on accurate memory and computing overhead estimation, which is often time-consuming and misleading. Existing training systems and machine learning pipelines either physically execute each operand or estimate memory usage with a scaled input tensor. To address these challenges, we introduce a system that can jointly optimize distributed execution and gradient checkpointing plans. Additionally, we provide an easy-to-use symbolic profiler that generates memory and computing statistics for any PyTorch model with a minimal time cost. Our approach allows users to parallelize their model training on the given hardware with minimum code change based. The source code is publicly available at Colossal-AI GitHub or https://github.com/hpcaitech/ColossalAI

MAP: Memory-aware Automated Intra-op Parallel Training For Foundation Models

Recently, large models have achieved the state of the art performances in various fields. In order to support large model training, we have to use distributed training techniques. However, finding an efficient distributed execution plan not only requires fine-grained model statistics, such as memory and computing overhead of each operator but also is a labor-intensive task even for an expert in the field of distributed training. In this paper, we introduce MAP, a compiler built upon PyTorch to implement Memory-aware Automated Parallelization. To profiling operator costs, existing training systems and machine learning pipelines either physically execute with respect to each operand or estimate the memory usage with a scaled input tensor, which are often time-consuming and misleading. Compared with existing methods, MAP provides an easy-to-use symbolic profiler to generate memory and computing statistics of an arbitrary PyTorch model with trivial time cost, so it will boost high productivity for ML developers. In addition, MAP can also seamlessly speed up different static planning tasks on computation graphs for PyTorch, and requires only a few lines of modification to user code to generate a new module instance that has a top-performing distributed execution plan. The source code is publicly available at https://github.com/hpcaitech/ColossalAI

Adaptive Computation with Elastic Input Sequence

When solving a problem, human beings have the adaptive ability in terms of the type of information they use, the procedure they take, and the amount of time they spend approaching and solving the problem. However, most standard neural networks have the same function type and fixed computation budget on different samples regardless of their nature and difficulty. Adaptivity is a powerful paradigm as it not only imbues practitioners with flexibility pertaining to the downstream usage of these models but can also serve as a powerful inductive bias for solving certain challenging classes of problems. In this work, we propose a new strategy, AdaTape, that enables dynamic computation in neural networks via adaptive tape tokens. AdaTape employs an elastic input sequence by equipping an existing architecture with a dynamic read-and-write tape. Specifically, we adaptively generate input sequences using tape tokens obtained from a tape bank that can either be trainable or generated from input data. We analyze the challenges and requirements to obtain dynamic sequence content and length, and propose the Adaptive Tape Reader (ATR) algorithm to achieve both objectives. Via extensive experiments on image recognition tasks, we show that AdaTape can achieve better performance while maintaining the computational cost.

MIGPerf: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Deep Learning Training and Inference Workloads on Multi-Instance GPUs

New architecture GPUs like A100 are now equipped with multi-instance GPU (MIG) technology, which allows the GPU to be partitioned into multiple small, isolated instances. This technology provides more flexibility for users to support both deep learning training and inference workloads, but efficiently utilizing it can still be challenging. The vision of this paper is to provide a more comprehensive and practical benchmark study for MIG in order to eliminate the need for tedious manual benchmarking and tuning efforts. To achieve this vision, the paper presents MIGPerf, an open-source tool that streamlines the benchmark study for MIG. Using MIGPerf, the authors conduct a series of experiments, including deep learning training and inference characterization on MIG, GPU sharing characterization, and framework compatibility with MIG. The results of these experiments provide new insights and guidance for users to effectively employ MIG, and lay the foundation for further research on the orchestration of hybrid training and inference workloads on MIGs. The code and results are released on https://github.com/MLSysOps/MIGProfiler. This work is still in progress and more results will be published soon.

On the Inconsistencies of Conditionals Learned by Masked Language Models

Learning to predict masked tokens in a sequence has been shown to be a powerful pretraining objective for large-scale language models. After training, such masked language models can provide distributions of tokens conditioned on bidirectional context. In this short draft, we show that such bidirectional conditionals often demonstrate considerable inconsistencies, i.e., they can not be derived from a coherent joint distribution when considered together. We empirically quantify such inconsistencies in the simple scenario of bigrams for two common styles of masked language models: T5-style and BERT-style. For example, we show that T5 models often confuse its own preference regarding two similar bigrams. Such inconsistencies may represent a theoretical pitfall for the research work on sampling sequences based on the bidirectional conditionals learned by BERT-style MLMs. This phenomenon also means that T5-style MLMs capable of infilling will generate discrepant results depending on how much masking is given, which may represent a particular trust issue.

GPTR: Gestalt-Perception Transformer for Diagram Object Detection

Diagram object detection is the key basis of practical applications such as textbook question answering. Because the diagram mainly consists of simple lines and color blocks, its visual features are sparser than those of natural images. In addition, diagrams usually express diverse knowledge, in which there are many low-frequency object categories in diagrams. These lead to the fact that traditional data-driven detection model is not suitable for diagrams. In this work, we propose a gestalt-perception transformer model for diagram object detection, which is based on an encoder-decoder architecture. Gestalt perception contains a series of laws to explain human perception, that the human visual system tends to perceive patches in an image that are similar, close or connected without abrupt directional changes as a perceptual whole object. Inspired by these thoughts, we build a gestalt-perception graph in transformer encoder, which is composed of diagram patches as nodes and the relationships between patches as edges. This graph aims to group these patches into objects via laws of similarity, proximity, and smoothness implied in these edges, so that the meaningful objects can be effectively detected. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed GPTR achieves the best results in the diagram object detection task. Our model also obtains comparable results over the competitors in natural image object detection.