No Arabic abstract
We reduce training time in convolutional networks (CNNs) with a method that, for some of the mini-batches: a) scales down the resolution of input images via downsampling, and b) reduces the forward pass operations via pooling on the convolution filters. Training is performed in an interleaved fashion; some batches undergo the regular forward and backpropagation passes with original network parameters, whereas others undergo a forward pass with pooled filters and downsampled inputs. Since pooling is differentiable, the gradients of the pooled filters propagate to the original network parameters for a standard parameter update. The latter phase requires fewer floating point operations and less storage due to the reduced spatial dimensions in feature maps and filters. The key idea is that this phase leads to smaller and approximate updates and thus slower learning, but at significantly reduced cost, followed by passes that use the original network parameters as a refinement stage. Deciding how often and for which batches the downsmapling occurs can be done either stochastically or deterministically, and can be defined as a training hyperparameter itself. Experiments on residual architectures show that we can achieve up to 23% reduction in training time with minimal loss in validation accuracy.
Recent progress in deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have enabled a simple paradigm of architecture design: larger models typically achieve better accuracy. Due to this, in modern CNN architectures, it becomes more important to design models that generalize well under certain resource constraints, e.g. the number of parameters. In this paper, we propose a simple way to improve the capacity of any CNN model having large-scale features, without adding more parameters. In particular, we modify a standard convolutional layer to have a new functionality of channel-selectivity, so that the layer is trained to select important channels to re-distribute their parameters. Our experimental results under various CNN architectures and datasets demonstrate that the proposed new convolutional layer allows new optima that generalize better via efficient resource utilization, compared to the baseline.
Input perturbation methods occlude parts of an input to a function and measure the change in the functions output. Recently, input perturbation methods have been applied to generate and evaluate saliency maps from convolutional neural networks. In practice, neutral baseline images are used for the occlusion, such that the baseline images impact on the classification probability is minimal. However, in this paper we show that arguably neutral baseline images still impact the generated saliency maps and their evaluation with input perturbations. We also demonstrate that many choices of hyperparameters lead to the divergence of saliency maps generated by input perturbations. We experimentally reveal inconsistencies among a selection of input perturbation methods and find that they lack robustness for generating saliency maps and for evaluating saliency maps as saliency metrics.
Background: Floods are the most common natural disaster in the world, affecting the lives of hundreds of millions. Flood forecasting is therefore a vitally important endeavor, typically achieved using physical water flow simulations, which rely on accurate terrain elevation maps. However, such simulations, based on solving partial differential equations, are computationally prohibitive on a large scale. This scalability issue is commonly alleviated using a coarse grid representation of the elevation map, though this representation may distort crucial terrain details, leading to significant inaccuracies in the simulation. Contributions: We train a deep neural network to perform physics-informed downsampling of the terrain map: we optimize the coarse grid representation of the terrain maps, so that the flood prediction will match the fine grid solution. For the learning process to succeed, we configure a dataset specifically for this task. We demonstrate that with this method, it is possible to achieve a significant reduction in computational cost, while maintaining an accurate solution. A reference implementation accompanies the paper as well as documentation and code for dataset reproduction.
Recent works on sparse neural networks have demonstrated that it is possible to train a sparse network in isolation to match the performance of the corresponding dense networks with a fraction of parameters. However, the identification of these performant sparse neural networks (winning tickets) either involves a costly iterative train-prune-retrain process (e.g., Lottery Ticket Hypothesis) or an over-extended sparse training time (e.g., Training with Dynamic Sparsity), both of which would raise financial and environmental concerns. In this work, we attempt to address this cost-reducing problem by introducing the FreeTickets concept, as the first solution which can boost the performance of sparse convolutional neural networks over their dense network equivalents by a large margin, while using for complete training only a fraction of the computational resources required by the latter. Concretely, we instantiate the FreeTickets concept, by proposing two novel efficient ensemble methods with dynamic sparsity, which yield in one shot many diverse and accurate tickets for free during the sparse training process. The combination of these free tickets into an ensemble demonstrates a significant improvement in accuracy, uncertainty estimation, robustness, and efficiency over the corresponding dense (ensemble) networks. Our results provide new insights into the strength of sparse neural networks and suggest that the benefits of sparsity go way beyond the usual training/inference expected efficiency. We will release all codes in https://github.com/Shiweiliuiiiiiii/FreeTickets.
Generative models dealing with modeling a~joint data distribution are generally either autoencoder or GAN based. Both have their pros and cons, generating blurry images or being unstable in training or prone to mode collapse phenomenon, respectively. The objective of this paper is to construct a~model situated between above architectures, one that does not inherit their main weaknesses. The proposed LCW generator (Latent Cramer-Wold generator) resembles a classical GAN in transforming Gaussian noise into data space. What is of utmost importance, instead of a~discriminator, LCW generator uses kernel distance. No adversarial training is utilized, hence the name generator. It is trained in two phases. First, an autoencoder based architecture, using kernel measures, is built to model a manifold of data. We propose a Latent Trick mapping a Gaussian to latent in order to get the final model. This results in very competitive FID values.