No Arabic abstract
In this paper, we propose a new measure to gauge the complexity of image classification problems. Given an annotated image dataset, our method computes a complexity measure called the cumulative spectral gradient (CSG) which strongly correlates with the test accuracy of convolutional neural networks (CNN). The CSG measure is derived from the probabilistic divergence between classes in a spectral clustering framework. We show that this metric correlates with the overall separability of the dataset and thus its inherent complexity. As will be shown, our metric can be used for dataset reduction, to assess which classes are more difficult to disentangle, and approximate the accuracy one could expect to get with a CNN. Results obtained on 11 datasets and three CNN models reveal that our method is more accurate and faster than previous complexity measures.
Image quality assessment (IQA) is the key factor for the fast development of image restoration (IR) algorithms. The most recent perceptual IR algorithms based on generative adversarial networks (GANs) have brought in significant improvement on visual performance, but also pose great challenges for quantitative evaluation. Notably, we observe an increasing inconsistency between perceptual quality and the evaluation results. We present two questions: Can existing IQA methods objectively evaluate recent IR algorithms? With the focus on beating current benchmarks, are we getting better IR algorithms? To answer the questions and promote the development of IQA methods, we contribute a large-scale IQA dataset, called Perceptual Image Processing ALgorithms (PIPAL) dataset. Especially, this dataset includes the results of GAN-based IR algorithms, which are missing in previous datasets. We collect more than 1.13 million human judgments to assign subjective scores for PIPAL images using the more reliable Elo system. Based on PIPAL, we present new benchmarks for both IQA and SR methods. Our results indicate that existing IQA methods cannot fairly evaluate GAN-based IR algorithms. While using appropriate evaluation methods is important, IQA methods should also be updated along with the development of IR algorithms. At last, we shed light on how to improve the IQA performance on GAN-based distortion. Inspired by the find that the existing IQA methods have an unsatisfactory performance on the GAN-based distortion partially because of their low tolerance to spatial misalignment, we propose to improve the performance of an IQA network on GAN-based distortion by explicitly considering this misalignment. We propose the Space Warping Difference Network, which includes the novel l_2 pooling layers and Space Warping Difference layers. Experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.
Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) have become common in many fields including computer vision, speech recognition, and natural language processing. Although CNN hardware accelerators are already included as part of many SoC architectures, the task of achieving high accuracy on resource-restricted devices is still considered challenging, mainly due to the vast number of design parameters that need to be balanced to achieve an efficient solution. Quantization techniques, when applied to the network parameters, lead to a reduction of power and area and may also change the ratio between communication and computation. As a result, some algorithmic solutions may suffer from lack of memory bandwidth or computational resources and fail to achieve the expected performance due to hardware constraints. Thus, the system designer and the micro-architect need to understand at early development stages the impact of their high-level decisions (e.g., the architecture of the CNN and the amount of bits used to represent its parameters) on the final product (e.g., the expected power saving, area, and accuracy). Unfortunately, existing tools fall short of supporting such decisions. This paper introduces a hardware-aware complexity metric that aims to assist the system designer of the neural network architectures, through the entire project lifetime (especially at its early stages) by predicting the impact of architectural and micro-architectural decisions on the final product. We demonstrate how the proposed metric can help evaluate different design alternatives of neural network models on resource-restricted devices such as real-time embedded systems, and to avoid making design mistakes at early stages.
Few-shot classification refers to learning a classifier for new classes given only a few examples. While a plethora of models have emerged to tackle it, we find the procedure and datasets that are used to assess their progress lacking. To address this limitation, we propose Meta-Dataset: a new benchmark for training and evaluating models that is large-scale, consists of diverse datasets, and presents more realistic tasks. We experiment with popular baselines and meta-learners on Meta-Dataset, along with a competitive method that we propose. We analyze performance as a function of various characteristics of test tasks and examine the models ability to leverage diverse training sources for improving their generalization. We also propose a new set of baselines for quantifying the benefit of meta-learning in Meta-Dataset. Our extensive experimentation has uncovered important research challenges and we hope to inspire work in these directions.
We introduce a new molecular dataset, named Alchemy, for developing machine learning models useful in chemistry and material science. As of June 20th 2019, the dataset comprises of 12 quantum mechanical properties of 119,487 organic molecules with up to 14 heavy atoms, sampled from the GDB MedChem database. The Alchemy dataset expands the volume and diversity of existing molecular datasets. Our extensive benchmarks of the state-of-the-art graph neural network models on Alchemy clearly manifest the usefulness of new data in validating and developing machine learning models for chemistry and material science. We further launch a contest to attract attentions from researchers in the related fields. More details can be found on the contest website footnote{https://alchemy.tencent.com}. At the time of benchamrking experiment, we have generated 119,487 molecules in our Alchemy dataset. More molecular samples are generated since then. Hence, we provide a list of molecules used in the reported benchmarks.
We present an efficient algorithm for model-free episodic reinforcement learning on large (potentially continuous) state-action spaces. Our algorithm is based on a novel $Q$-learning policy with adaptive data-driven discretization. The central idea is to maintain a finer partition of the state-action space in regions which are frequently visited in historical trajectories, and have higher payoff estimates. We demonstrate how our adaptive partitions take advantage of the shape of the optimal $Q$-function and the joint space, without sacrificing the worst-case performance. In particular, we recover the regret guarantees of prior algorithms for continuous state-action spaces, which additionally require either an optimal discretization as input, and/or access to a simulation oracle. Moreover, experiments demonstrate how our algorithm automatically adapts to the underlying structure of the problem, resulting in much better performance compared both to heuristics and $Q$-learning with uniform discretization.