No Arabic abstract
In this paper, we present MicroNet, which is an efficient convolutional neural network using extremely low computational cost (e.g. 6 MFLOPs on ImageNet classification). Such a low cost network is highly desired on edge devices, yet usually suffers from a significant performance degradation. We handle the extremely low FLOPs based upon two design principles: (a) avoiding the reduction of network width by lowering the node connectivity, and (b) compensating for the reduction of network depth by introducing more complex non-linearity per layer. Firstly, we propose Micro-Factorized convolution to factorize both pointwise and depthwise convolutions into low rank matrices for a good tradeoff between the number of channels and input/output connectivity. Secondly, we propose a new activation function, named Dynamic Shift-Max, to improve the non-linearity via maxing out multiple dynamic fusions between an input feature map and its circular channel shift. The fusions are dynamic as their parameters are adapted to the input. Building upon Micro-Factorized convolution and dynamic Shift-Max, a family of MicroNets achieve a significant performance gain over the state-of-the-art in the low FLOP regime. For instance, MicroNet-M1 achieves 61.1% top-1 accuracy on ImageNet classification with 12 MFLOPs, outperforming MobileNetV3 by 11.3%.
This paper aims at addressing the problem of substantial performance degradation at extremely low computational cost (e.g. 5M FLOPs on ImageNet classification). We found that two factors, sparse connectivity and dynamic activation function, are effective to improve the accuracy. The former avoids the significant reduction of network width, while the latter mitigates the detriment of reduction in network depth. Technically, we propose micro-factorized convolution, which factorizes a convolution matrix into low rank matrices, to integrate sparse connectivity into convolution. We also present a new dynamic activation function, named Dynamic Shift Max, to improve the non-linearity via maxing out multiple dynamic fusions between an input feature map and its circular channel shift. Building upon these two new operators, we arrive at a family of networks, named MicroNet, that achieves significant performance gains over the state of the art in the low FLOP regime. For instance, under the constraint of 12M FLOPs, MicroNet achieves 59.4% top-1 accuracy on ImageNet classification, outperforming MobileNetV3 by 9.6%. Source code is at href{https://github.com/liyunsheng13/micronet}{https://github.com/liyunsheng13/micronet}.
Existing image-to-image transformation approaches primarily focus on synthesizing visually pleasing data. Generating images with correct identity labels is challenging yet much less explored. It is even more challenging to deal with image transformation tasks with large deformation in poses, viewpoints, or scales while preserving the identity, such as face rotation and object viewpoint morphing. In this paper, we aim at transforming an image with a fine-grained category to synthesize new images that preserve the identity of the input image, which can thereby benefit the subsequent fine-grained image recognition and few-shot learning tasks. The generated images, transformed with large geometric deformation, do not necessarily need to be of high visual quality but are required to maintain as much identity information as possible. To this end, we adopt a model based on generative adversarial networks to disentangle the identity related and unrelated factors of an image. In order to preserve the fine-grained contextual details of the input image during the deformable transformation, a constrained nonalignment connection method is proposed to construct learnable highways between intermediate convolution blocks in the generator. Moreover, an adaptive identity modulation mechanism is proposed to transfer the identity information into the output image effectively. Extensive experiments on the CompCars and Multi-PIE datasets demonstrate that our model preserves the identity of the generated images much better than the state-of-the-art image-to-image transformation models, and as a result significantly boosts the visual recognition performance in fine-grained few-shot learning.
Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs) have been widely used in sequence analysis and modeling. However, when processing high-dimensional data, RNNs typically require very large model sizes, thereby bringing a series of deployment challenges. Although various prior works have been proposed to reduce the RNN model sizes, executing RNN models in resource-restricted environments is still a very challenging problem. In this paper, we propose to develop extremely compact RNN models with fully decomposed hierarchical Tucker (FDHT) structure. The HT decomposition does not only provide much higher storage cost reduction than the other tensor decomposition approaches but also brings better accuracy performance improvement for the compact RNN models. Meanwhile, unlike the existing tensor decomposition-based methods that can only decompose the input-to-hidden layer of RNNs, our proposed fully decomposition approach enables the comprehensive compression for the entire RNN models with maintaining very high accuracy. Our experimental results on several popular video recognition datasets show that our proposed fully decomposed hierarchical tucker-based LSTM (FDHT-LSTM) is extremely compact and highly efficient. To the best of our knowledge, FDHT-LSTM, for the first time, consistently achieves very high accuracy with only few thousand parameters (3,132 to 8,808) on different datasets. Compared with the state-of-the-art compressed RNN models, such as TT-LSTM, TR-LSTM and BT-LSTM, our FDHT-LSTM simultaneously enjoys both order-of-magnitude (3,985x to 10,711x) fewer parameters and significant accuracy improvement (0.6% to 12.7%).
Human observers can learn to recognize new categories of images from a handful of examples, yet doing so with artificial ones remains an open challenge. We hypothesize that data-efficient recognition is enabled by representations which make the variability in natural signals more predictable. We therefore revisit and improve Contrastive Predictive Coding, an unsupervised objective for learning such representations. This new implementation produces features which support state-of-the-art linear classification accuracy on the ImageNet dataset. When used as input for non-linear classification with deep neural networks, this representation allows us to use 2-5x less labels than classifiers trained directly on image pixels. Finally, this unsupervised representation substantially improves transfer learning to object detection on the PASCAL VOC dataset, surpassing fully supervised pre-trained ImageNet classifiers.
The Low-Power Image Recognition Challenge (LPIRC, https://rebootingcomputing.ieee.org/lpirc) is an annual competition started in 2015. The competition identifies the best technologies that can classify and detect objects in images efficiently (short execution time and low energy consumption) and accurately (high precision). Over the four years, the winners scores have improved more than 24 times. As computer vision is widely used in many battery-powered systems (such as drones and mobile phones), the need for low-power computer vision will become increasingly important. This paper summarizes LPIRC 2018 by describing the three different tracks and the winners solutions.