Efficient Training with Denoised Neural Weights

Good weight initialization serves as an effective measure to reduce the training cost of a deep neural network (DNN) model. The choice of how to initialize parameters is challenging and may require manual tuning, which can be time-consuming and prone to human error. To overcome such limitations, this work takes a novel step towards building a weight generator to synthesize the neural weights for initialization. We use the image-to-image translation task with generative adversarial networks (GANs) as an example due to the ease of collecting model weights spanning a wide range. Specifically, we first collect a dataset with various image editing concepts and their corresponding trained weights, which are later used for the training of the weight generator. To address the different characteristics among layers and the substantial number of weights to be predicted, we divide the weights into equal-sized blocks and assign each block an index. Subsequently, a diffusion model is trained with such a dataset using both text conditions of the concept and the block indexes. By initializing the image translation model with the denoised weights predicted by our diffusion model, the training requires only 43.3 seconds. Compared to training from scratch (i.e., Pix2pix), we achieve a 15x training time acceleration for a new concept while obtaining even better image generation quality.

DiffClass: Diffusion-Based Class Incremental Learning

Class Incremental Learning (CIL) is challenging due to catastrophic forgetting. On top of that, Exemplar-free Class Incremental Learning is even more challenging due to forbidden access to previous task data. Recent exemplar-free CIL methods attempt to mitigate catastrophic forgetting by synthesizing previous task data. However, they fail to overcome the catastrophic forgetting due to the inability to deal with the significant domain gap between real and synthetic data. To overcome these issues, we propose a novel exemplar-free CIL method. Our method adopts multi-distribution matching (MDM) diffusion models to unify quality and bridge domain gaps among all domains of training data. Moreover, our approach integrates selective synthetic image augmentation (SSIA) to expand the distribution of the training data, thereby improving the model's plasticity and reinforcing the performance of our method's ultimate component, multi-domain adaptation (MDA). With the proposed integrations, our method then reformulates exemplar-free CIL into a multi-domain adaptation problem to implicitly address the domain gap problem to enhance model stability during incremental training. Extensive experiments on benchmark class incremental datasets and settings demonstrate that our method excels previous exemplar-free CIL methods and achieves state-of-the-art performance.

E$^{2}$GAN: Efficient Training of Efficient GANs for Image-to-Image Translation

One highly promising direction for enabling flexible real-time on-device image editing is utilizing data distillation by leveraging large-scale text-to-image diffusion models, such as Stable Diffusion, to generate paired datasets used for training generative adversarial networks (GANs). This approach notably alleviates the stringent requirements typically imposed by high-end commercial GPUs for performing image editing with diffusion models. However, unlike text-to-image diffusion models, each distilled GAN is specialized for a specific image editing task, necessitating costly training efforts to obtain models for various concepts. In this work, we introduce and address a novel research direction: can the process of distilling GANs from diffusion models be made significantly more efficient? To achieve this goal, we propose a series of innovative techniques. First, we construct a base GAN model with generalized features, adaptable to different concepts through fine-tuning, eliminating the need for training from scratch. Second, we identify crucial layers within the base GAN model and employ Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) with a simple yet effective rank search process, rather than fine-tuning the entire base model. Third, we investigate the minimal amount of data necessary for fine-tuning, further reducing the overall training time. Extensive experiments show that we can efficiently empower GANs with the ability to perform real-time high-quality image editing on mobile devices with remarkable reduced training cost and storage for each concept.

DualHSIC: HSIC-Bottleneck and Alignment for Continual Learning

Rehearsal-based approaches are a mainstay of continual learning (CL). They mitigate the catastrophic forgetting problem by maintaining a small fixed-size buffer with a subset of data from past tasks. While most rehearsal-based approaches study how to effectively exploit the knowledge from the buffered past data, little attention is paid to the inter-task relationships with the critical task-specific and task-invariant knowledge. By appropriately leveraging inter-task relationships, we propose a novel CL method named DualHSIC to boost the performance of existing rehearsal-based methods in a simple yet effective way. DualHSIC consists of two complementary components that stem from the so-called Hilbert Schmidt independence criterion (HSIC): HSIC-Bottleneck for Rehearsal (HBR) lessens the inter-task interference and HSIC Alignment (HA) promotes task-invariant knowledge sharing. Extensive experiments show that DualHSIC can be seamlessly plugged into existing rehearsal-based methods for consistent performance improvements, and also outperforms recent state-of-the-art regularization-enhanced rehearsal methods. Source code will be released.

All-in-One: A Highly Representative DNN Pruning Framework for Edge Devices with Dynamic Power Management

During the deployment of deep neural networks (DNNs) on edge devices, many research efforts are devoted to the limited hardware resource. However, little attention is paid to the influence of dynamic power management. As edge devices typically only have a budget of energy with batteries (rather than almost unlimited energy support on servers or workstations), their dynamic power management often changes the execution frequency as in the widely-used dynamic voltage and frequency scaling (DVFS) technique. This leads to highly unstable inference speed performance, especially for computation-intensive DNN models, which can harm user experience and waste hardware resources. We firstly identify this problem and then propose All-in-One, a highly representative pruning framework to work with dynamic power management using DVFS. The framework can use only one set of model weights and soft masks (together with other auxiliary parameters of negligible storage) to represent multiple models of various pruning ratios. By re-configuring the model to the corresponding pruning ratio for a specific execution frequency (and voltage), we are able to achieve stable inference speed, i.e., keeping the difference in speed performance under various execution frequencies as small as possible. Our experiments demonstrate that our method not only achieves high accuracy for multiple models of different pruning ratios, but also reduces their variance of inference latency for various frequencies, with minimal memory consumption of only one model and one soft mask.

SparCL: Sparse Continual Learning on the Edge

Existing work in continual learning (CL) focuses on mitigating catastrophic forgetting, i.e., model performance deterioration on past tasks when learning a new task. However, the training efficiency of a CL system is under-investigated, which limits the real-world application of CL systems under resource-limited scenarios. In this work, we propose a novel framework called Sparse Continual Learning(SparCL), which is the first study that leverages sparsity to enable cost-effective continual learning on edge devices. SparCL achieves both training acceleration and accuracy preservation through the synergy of three aspects: weight sparsity, data efficiency, and gradient sparsity. Specifically, we propose task-aware dynamic masking (TDM) to learn a sparse network throughout the entire CL process, dynamic data removal (DDR) to remove less informative training data, and dynamic gradient masking (DGM) to sparsify the gradient updates. Each of them not only improves efficiency, but also further mitigates catastrophic forgetting. SparCL consistently improves the training efficiency of existing state-of-the-art (SOTA) CL methods by at most 23X less training FLOPs, and, surprisingly, further improves the SOTA accuracy by at most 1.7%. SparCL also outperforms competitive baselines obtained from adapting SOTA sparse training methods to the CL setting in both efficiency and accuracy. We also evaluate the effectiveness of SparCL on a real mobile phone, further indicating the practical potential of our method.

Compiler-Aware Neural Architecture Search for On-Mobile Real-time Super-Resolution

Deep learning-based super-resolution (SR) has gained tremendous popularity in recent years because of its high image quality performance and wide application scenarios. However, prior methods typically suffer from large amounts of computations and huge power consumption, causing difficulties for real-time inference, especially on resource-limited platforms such as mobile devices. To mitigate this, we propose a compiler-aware SR neural architecture search (NAS) framework that conducts depth search and per-layer width search with adaptive SR blocks. The inference speed is directly taken into the optimization along with the SR loss to derive SR models with high image quality while satisfying the real-time inference requirement. Instead of measuring the speed on mobile devices at each iteration during the search process, a speed model incorporated with compiler optimizations is leveraged to predict the inference latency of the SR block with various width configurations for faster convergence. With the proposed framework, we achieve real-time SR inference for implementing 720p resolution with competitive SR performance (in terms of PSNR and SSIM) on GPU/DSP of mobile platforms (Samsung Galaxy S21).

Automatic Mapping of the Best-Suited DNN Pruning Schemes for Real-Time Mobile Acceleration

Weight pruning is an effective model compression technique to tackle the challenges of achieving real-time deep neural network (DNN) inference on mobile devices. However, prior pruning schemes have limited application scenarios due to accuracy degradation, difficulty in leveraging hardware acceleration, and/or restriction on certain types of DNN layers. In this paper, we propose a general, fine-grained structured pruning scheme and corresponding compiler optimizations that are applicable to any type of DNN layer while achieving high accuracy and hardware inference performance. With the flexibility of applying different pruning schemes to different layers enabled by our compiler optimizations, we further probe into the new problem of determining the best-suited pruning scheme considering the different acceleration and accuracy performance of various pruning schemes. Two pruning scheme mapping methods, one is search-based and the other is rule-based, are proposed to automatically derive the best-suited pruning regularity and block size for each layer of any given DNN. Experimental results demonstrate that our pruning scheme mapping methods, together with the general fine-grained structured pruning scheme, outperform the state-of-the-art DNN optimization framework with up to 2.48$\times$ and 1.73$\times$ DNN inference acceleration on CIFAR-10 and ImageNet dataset without accuracy loss.

MEST: Accurate and Fast Memory-Economic Sparse Training Framework on the Edge

Recently, a new trend of exploring sparsity for accelerating neural network training has emerged, embracing the paradigm of training on the edge. This paper proposes a novel Memory-Economic Sparse Training (MEST) framework targeting for accurate and fast execution on edge devices. The proposed MEST framework consists of enhancements by Elastic Mutation (EM) and Soft Memory Bound (&S) that ensure superior accuracy at high sparsity ratios. Different from the existing works for sparse training, this current work reveals the importance of sparsity schemes on the performance of sparse training in terms of accuracy as well as training speed on real edge devices. On top of that, the paper proposes to employ data efficiency for further acceleration of sparse training. Our results suggest that unforgettable examples can be identified in-situ even during the dynamic exploration of sparsity masks in the sparse training process, and therefore can be removed for further training speedup on edge devices. Comparing with state-of-the-art (SOTA) works on accuracy, our MEST increases Top-1 accuracy significantly on ImageNet when using the same unstructured sparsity scheme. Systematical evaluation on accuracy, training speed, and memory footprint are conducted, where the proposed MEST framework consistently outperforms representative SOTA works. A reviewer strongly against our work based on his false assumptions and misunderstandings. On top of the previous submission, we employ data efficiency for further acceleration of sparse training. And we explore the impact of model sparsity, sparsity schemes, and sparse training algorithms on the number of removable training examples. Our codes are publicly available at: https://github.com/boone891214/MEST.

Achieving on-Mobile Real-Time Super-Resolution with Neural Architecture and Pruning Search

Though recent years have witnessed remarkable progress in single image super-resolution (SISR) tasks with the prosperous development of deep neural networks (DNNs), the deep learning methods are confronted with the computation and memory consumption issues in practice, especially for resource-limited platforms such as mobile devices. To overcome the challenge and facilitate the real-time deployment of SISR tasks on mobile, we combine neural architecture search with pruning search and propose an automatic search framework that derives sparse super-resolution (SR) models with high image quality while satisfying the real-time inference requirement. To decrease the search cost, we leverage the weight sharing strategy by introducing a supernet and decouple the search problem into three stages, including supernet construction, compiler-aware architecture and pruning search, and compiler-aware pruning ratio search. With the proposed framework, we are the first to achieve real-time SR inference (with only tens of milliseconds per frame) for implementing 720p resolution with competitive image quality (in terms of PSNR and SSIM) on mobile platforms (Samsung Galaxy S20).