Deep learning algorithms are increasingly employed at the edge. However, edge devices are resource constrained and thus require efficient deployment of deep neural networks. Pruning methods are a key tool for edge deployment as they can improve storage, compute, memory bandwidth, and energy usage. In this paper we propose a novel accurate pruning technique that allows precise control over the output network size. Our method uses an efficient optimal transportation scheme which we make end-to-end differentiable and which automatically tunes the exploration-exploitation behavior of the algorithm to find accurate sparse sub-networks. We show that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance compared to previous pruning methods on 3 different datasets, using 5 different models, across a wide range of pruning ratios, and with two types of sparsity budgets and pruning granularities.
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Temporal-Coded Spiking Neural Networks with Dynamic Firing Threshold: Learning with Event-Driven Backpropagation
PDF ↗Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) offer a highly promising computing paradigm due to their biological plausibility, exceptional spatiotemporal information processing capability and low power consumption. As a temporal encoding scheme for SNNs, Time-To-First-Spike (TTFS) encodes information using the timing of a single spike, which allows spiking neurons to transmit information through sparse spike trains and results in lower power consumption and higher computational efficiency compared to traditional rate-based encoding counterparts. However, despite the advantages of the TTFS encoding scheme, the effective and efficient training of TTFS-based deep SNNs remains a significant and open research problem. In this work, we first examine the factors underlying the limitations of applying existing TTFS-based learning algorithms to deep SNNs. Specifically, we investigate issues related to over-sparsity of spikes and the complexity of finding the `causal set'. We then propose a simple yet efficient dynamic firing threshold (DFT) mechanism for spiking neurons to address these issues. Building upon the proposed DFT mechanism, we further introduce a novel direct training algorithm for TTFS-based deep SNNs, called DTA-TTFS. This method utilizes event-driven processing and spike timing to enable efficient learning of deep SNNs. The proposed training method was validated on the image classification task and experimental results clearly demonstrate that our proposed method achieves state-of-the-art accuracy in comparison to existing TTFS-based learning algorithms, while maintaining high levels of sparsity and energy efficiency on neuromorphic inference accelerator.
Model binarization can significantly compress model size, reduce energy consumption, and accelerate inference through efficient bit-wise operations. Although binarizing convolutional neural networks have been extensively studied, there is little work on exploring binarization of vision Transformers which underpin most recent breakthroughs in visual recognition. To this end, we propose to solve two fundamental challenges to push the horizon of Binary Vision Transformers (BiViT). First, the traditional binary method does not take the long-tailed distribution of softmax attention into consideration, bringing large binarization errors in the attention module. To solve this, we propose Softmax-aware Binarization, which dynamically adapts to the data distribution and reduces the error caused by binarization. Second, to better preserve the information of the pretrained model and restore accuracy, we propose a Cross-layer Binarization scheme that decouples the binarization of self-attention and multi-layer perceptrons (MLPs), and Parameterized Weight Scales which introduce learnable scaling factors for weight binarization. Overall, our method performs favorably against state-of-the-arts by 19.8% on the TinyImageNet dataset. On ImageNet, our BiViT achieves a competitive 75.6% Top-1 accuracy over Swin-S model. Additionally, on COCO object detection, our method achieves an mAP of 40.8 with a Swin-T backbone over Cascade Mask R-CNN framework.
The recent interest in the edge-to-cloud continuum paradigm has emphasized the need for simple and scalable architectures to deliver optimal performance on computationally constrained devices. However, resource-efficient neural networks usually optimize for parameter count and thus use operators such as depthwise convolutions, which do not maximally exploit the efficiency of resource-constrained devices. In this article, we propose XiNet, a novel convolutional neural architecture that targets edge devices. We derived the XiNet architecture from an extensive real-world efficiency analysis of various neural network operators (e.g., standard, depthwise, and pointwise convolutions). Compared to other mobile architectures, our approach substantially improves the performance-complexity trade-off by optimizing the number of operations, parameters, and working memory (RAM). Moreover, we show how XiNet can be easily adapted to different devices thanks to Hardware Aware Scaling (HAS), which enables disjoint optimization of RAM, FLASH, and operations count. We analyze the scaling properties of our architecture under different hardware constraints and validate it on the image classification task. Finally, we evaluate the performance of XiNet for object detection on the MS-COCO and VOC-2012 benchmarks and compare it with state-of-the-art mobile neural networks, achieving a 70% reduction in energy requirements with similar performance.
Wasserstein Expansible Variational Autoencoder for Discriminative and Generative Continual Learning
PDF ↗Task-Free Continual Learning (TFCL) represents a challenging learning paradigm where a model is trained on the non-stationary data distributions without any knowledge of the task information, thus representing a more practical approach. Despite promising achievements by the Variational Autoencoder (VAE) mixtures in continual learning, such methods ignore the redundancy among the probabilistic representations of their components when performing model expansion, leading to mixture components learning similar tasks. This paper proposes the Wasserstein Expansible Variational Autoencoder (WEVAE), which evaluates the statistical similarity between the probabilistic representation of new data and that represented by each mixture component and then uses it for deciding when to expand the model. Such a mechanism can avoid unnecessary model expansion while ensuring the knowledge diversity among the trained components. In addition, we propose an energy-based sample selection approach that assigns high energies to novel samples and low energies to the samples which are similar to the model's knowledge. Extensive empirical studies on both supervised and unsupervised benchmark tasks demonstrate that our model outperforms all competing methods. The code is available at https://github.com/dtuzi123/WEVAE/.
Out-of-distribution (OOD) detection is a desired ability to ensure the reliability and safety of intelligent systems. A scoring function is often designed to measure the degree of any new data being an OOD sample. While most designed scoring functions are based on a single source of information (e.g., the classifier's output, logits, or feature vector), recent studies demonstrate that fusion of multiple sources may help better detect OOD data. In this study, after detailed analysis of the issue in OOD detection by the conventional principal component analysis (PCA), we propose fusing a simple regularized PCA-based reconstruction error with other source of scoring function to further improve OOD detection performance. In particular, when combined with a strong energy score-based OOD method, the regularized reconstruction error helps achieve new state-of-the-art OOD detection results on multiple standard benchmarks. The code is available at https://github.com/SYSU-MIA-GROUP/pca-based-out-of-distribution-detection.
Federated learning (FL) is an emerging distributed machine learning method that empowers in-situ model training on decentralized edge devices. However, multiple simultaneous FL tasks could overload resource-constrained devices. In this work, we propose the first FL system to effectively coordinate and train multiple simultaneous FL tasks. We first formalize the problem of training simultaneous FL tasks. Then, we present our new approach, MAS (Merge and Split), to optimize the performance of training multiple simultaneous FL tasks. MAS starts by merging FL tasks into an all-in-one FL task with a multi-task architecture. After training for a few rounds, MAS splits the all-in-one FL task into two or more FL tasks by using the affinities among tasks measured during the all-in-one training. It then continues training each split of FL tasks based on model parameters from the all-in-one training. Extensive experiments demonstrate that MAS outperforms other methods while reducing training time by 2x and reducing energy consumption by 40%. We hope this work will inspire the community to further study and optimize training simultaneous FL tasks.
Towards Realistic Evaluation of Industrial Continual Learning Scenarios with an Emphasis on Energy Consumption and Computational Footprint
PDF ↗Incremental Learning (IL) aims to develop Machine Learning (ML) models that can learn from continuous streams of data and mitigate catastrophic forgetting. We analyse the current state-of-the-art Class-IL implementations and demonstrate why the current body of research tends to be one-dimensional, with an excessive focus on accuracy metrics. A realistic evaluation of Continual Learning methods should also emphasise energy consumption and overall computational load for a comprehensive understanding. This paper addresses research gaps between current IL research and industrial project environments, including varying incremental tasks and the introduction of Joint Training in tandem with IL. We introduce InVar-100 (Industrial Objects in Varied Contexts), a novel dataset meant to simulate the visual environments in industrial setups and perform various experiments for IL. Additionally, we incorporate explainability (using class activations) to interpret the model predictions. Our approach, RECIL (Real-World Scenarios and Energy Efficiency Considerations for Class Incremental Learning) provides meaningful insights about the applicability of IL approaches in practical use cases. The overarching aim is to bring the Incremental Learning and Green AI fields together and encourage the application of CIL methods in real-world scenarios. Code and dataset are available.
Spiking neural networks (SNNs) are brain-inspired energy-efficient models that encode information in spatiotemporal dynamics. Recently, deep SNNs trained directly have shown great success in achieving high performance on classification tasks with very few time steps. However, how to design a directly-trained SNN for the regression task of object detection still remains a challenging problem. To address this problem, we propose EMS-YOLO, a novel directly-trained SNN framework for object detection, which is the first trial to train a deep SNN with surrogate gradients for object detection rather than ANN-SNN conversion strategies. Specifically, we design a full-spike residual block, EMS-ResNet, which can effectively extend the depth of the directly-trained SNN with low power consumption. Furthermore, we theoretically analyze and prove the EMS-ResNet could avoid gradient vanishing or exploding. The results demonstrate that our approach outperforms the state-of-the-art ANN-SNN conversion methods (at least 500 time steps) in extremely fewer time steps (only 4 time steps). It is shown that our model could achieve comparable performance to the ANN with the same architecture while consuming 5.83x less energy on the frame-based COCO Dataset and the event-based Gen1 Dataset. Our code is available in https://github.com/BICLab/EMS-YOLO.
Efficient detectors for edge devices are often optimized for parameters or speed count metrics, which remain in weak correlation with the energy of detectors. However, some vision applications of convolutional neural networks, such as always-on surveillance cameras, are critical for energy constraints. This paper aims to serve as a baseline by designing detectors to reach tradeoffs between energy and performance from two perspectives: 1) We extensively analyze various CNNs to identify low-energy architectures, including selecting activation functions, convolutions operators, and feature fusion structures on necks. These underappreciated details in past work seriously affect the energy consumption of detectors; 2) To break through the dilemmatic energy-performance problem, we propose a balanced detector driven by energy using discovered low-energy components named FemtoDet. In addition to the novel construction, we improve FemtoDet by considering convolutions and training strategy optimizations. Specifically, we develop a new instance boundary enhancement (IBE) module for convolution optimization to overcome the contradiction between the limited capacity of CNNs and detection tasks in diverse spatial representations, and propose a recursive warm-restart (RecWR) for optimizing training strategy to escape the sub-optimization of light-weight detectors by considering the data shift produced in popular augmentations. As a result, FemtoDet with only 68.77k parameters achieves a competitive score of 46.3 AP50 on PASCAL VOC and 1.11 W & 64.47 FPS on Qualcomm Snapdragon 865 CPU platforms. Extensive experiments on COCO and TJU-DHD datasets indicate that the proposed method achieves competitive results in diverse scenes.
The vision community is undergoing the unprecedented progress with the emergence of Vision-Language Pretraining Models (VLMs). Prompt learning plays as the holy grail of accessing VLMs since it enables their fast adaptation to downstream tasks with limited resources. Whereas existing research milling around single-prompt paradigms, rarely investigate the technical potential behind their multi-prompt learning counterparts. This paper aims to provide a principled retrospect for vision-language multi-prompt learning. We extend the recent constant modality gap phenomenon to learnable prompts and then, justify the superiority of vision-language transfer with multi-prompt augmentation, empirically and theoretically. In terms of this observation, we propose an Energy-based Multi-prompt Learning (EMPL) to generate multiple prompt embeddings by drawing instances from an energy-based distribution, which is implicitly defined by VLMs. So our EMPL is not only parameter-efficient but also rigorously lead to the balance between in-domain and out-of-domain open-vocabulary generalization. Comprehensive experiments have been conducted to justify our claims and the excellence of EMPL.
As one of the energy-efficient alternatives of conventional neural networks (CNNs), spiking neural networks (SNNs) have gained more and more interest recently. To train the deep models, some effective batch normalization (BN) techniques are proposed in SNNs. All these BNs are suggested to be used after the convolution layer as usually doing in CNNs. However, the spiking neuron is much more complex with spatiotemporal dynamics. The regulated data flow after the BN layer will be disturbed again by the membrane potential updating operation before the firing function, i.e., the nonlinear activation. Therefore, we advocate adding another BN layer before the firing function to normalize the membrane potential again, called MPBN. To eliminate the induced time cost of MPBN, we also propose a training-inference-decoupled re-parameterization technique to fold the trained MPBN into the firing threshold. With the re-parameterization technique, the MPBN will not induce any extra time burden in the inference. Furthermore, the MPBN can also adopt the element-wised form, while the BN after the convolution layer can only use the channel-wised form. Experimental results show that the proposed MPBN performs well on both popular non-spiking static and neuromorphic datasets.
Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) are promising energy-efficient models for neuromorphic computing. For training the non-differentiable SNN models, the backpropagation through time (BPTT) with surrogate gradients (SG) method has achieved high performance. However, this method suffers from considerable memory cost and training time during training. In this paper, we propose the Spatial Learning Through Time (SLTT) method that can achieve high performance while greatly improving training efficiency compared with BPTT. First, we show that the backpropagation of SNNs through the temporal domain contributes just a little to the final calculated gradients. Thus, we propose to ignore the unimportant routes in the computational graph during backpropagation. The proposed method reduces the number of scalar multiplications and achieves a small memory occupation that is independent of the total time steps. Furthermore, we propose a variant of SLTT, called SLTT-K, that allows backpropagation only at K time steps, then the required number of scalar multiplications is further reduced and is independent of the total time steps. Experiments on both static and neuromorphic datasets demonstrate superior training efficiency and performance of our SLTT. In particular, our method achieves state-of-the-art accuracy on ImageNet, while the memory cost and training time are reduced by more than 70% and 50%, respectively, compared with BPTT.
Learning image classification and image generation using the same set of network parameters presents a formidable challenge. Recent advanced approaches perform well in one task often exhibit poor performance in the other. This work introduces an energy-based classifier and generator, namely EGC, which can achieve superior performance in both tasks using a single neural network. Unlike conventional classifiers that produce a label given an image (i.e., a conditional distribution p(y|x)), the forward pass in EGC is a classification model that yields a joint distribution p(x,y), enabling a diffusion model in its backward pass by marginalizing out the label y to estimate the score function. Furthermore, EGC can be adapted for unsupervised learning by considering the label as latent variables. EGC achieves competitive generation results compared with state-of-the-art approaches on ImageNet-1k, CelebA-HQ and LSUN Church, while achieving superior classification accuracy and robustness against adversarial attacks on CIFAR-10. This work marks the inaugural success in mastering both domains using a unified network parameter set. We believe that EGC bridges the gap between discriminative and generative learning.
Because of the diversity in lighting environments, existing illumination estimation techniques have been designed explicitly on indoor or outdoor environments. Methods have focused specifically on capturing accurate energy (e.g., through parametric lighting models), which emphasizes shading and strong cast shadows; or producing plausible texture (e.g., with GANs), which prioritizes plausible reflections. Approaches which provide editable lighting capabilities have been proposed, but these tend to be with simplified lighting models, offering limited realism. In this work, we propose to bridge the gap between these recent trends in the literature, and propose a method which combines a parametric light model with 360deg panoramas, ready to use as HDRI in rendering engines. We leverage recent advances in GAN-based LDR panorama extrapolation from a regular image, which we extend to HDR using parametric spherical gaussians. To achieve this, we introduce a novel lighting co-modulation method that injects lighting-related features throughout the generator, tightly coupling the original or edited scene illumination within the panorama generation process. In our representation, users can easily edit light direction, intensity, number, etc. to impact shading while providing rich, complex reflections while seamlessly blending with the edits. Furthermore, our method encompasses indoor and outdoor environments, demonstrating state-of-the-art results even when compared to domain-specific methods.
This paper studies the fundamental problem of multi-layer generator models in learning hierarchical representations. The multi-layer generator model that consists of multiple layers of latent variables organized in a top-down architecture tends to learn multiple levels of data abstraction. However, such multi-layer latent variables are typically parameterized to be Gaussian, which can be less informative in capturing complex abstractions, resulting in limited success in hierarchical representation learning. On the other hand, the energy-based (EBM) prior is known to be expressive in capturing the data regularities, but it often lacks the hierarchical structure to capture different levels of hierarchical representations. In this paper, we propose a joint latent space EBM prior model with multi-layer latent variables for effective hierarchical representation learning. We develop a variational joint learning scheme that seamlessly integrates an inference model for efficient inference. Our experiments demonstrate that the proposed joint EBM prior is effective and expressive in capturing hierarchical representations and modelling data distribution.
Event cameras provide an advantage over traditional frame-based cameras when capturing fast-moving objects without a motion blur. They achieve this by recording changes in light intensity (known as events), thus allowing them to operate at a much higher frequency and making them suitable for capturing motions in a highly dynamic scene. Many recent studies have proposed methods to train neural networks (NNs) for predicting optical flow from events. However, they often rely on a spatio-temporal representation constructed from events over a fixed interval, such as 10Hz used in training on the DSEC dataset. This limitation restricts the flow prediction to the same interval (10Hz) whereas the fast speed of event cameras, which can operate up to 3kHz, has not been effectively utilized. In this work, we show that a temporally dense flow estimation at 100Hz can be achieved by treating the flow estimation as a sequential problem using two different variants of recurrent networks - Long-short term memory (LSTM) and spiking neural network (SNN). First, We utilize the NN model constructed similar to the popular EV-FlowNet but with LSTM layers to demonstrate the efficiency of our training method. The model not only produces 10x more frequent optical flow than the existing ones, but the estimated flows also have 13% lower errors than predictions from the baseline EV-FlowNet. Second, we construct an EV-FlowNet SNN but with leaky integrate and fire neurons to efficiently capture the temporal dynamics. We found that simple inherent recurrent dynamics of SNN lead to significant parameter reduction compared to the LSTM model. In addition, because of its event-driven computation, the spiking model is estimated to consume only 1.5% energy of the LSTM model, highlighting the efficiency of SNN in processing events and the potential for achieving temporally dense flow.
The quad-Bayer patterned image sensor has made significant improvements in spatial resolution over recent years due to advancements in image sensor technology. This has enabled single-shot high-dynamic-range (HDR) imaging using spatially varying multiple exposures. Popular methods for multi-exposure array sensors involve varying the gain of each exposure, but this does not effectively change the photoelectronic energy in each exposure. Consequently, HDR images produced using gain-based exposure variation may suffer from noise and details being saturated. To address this problem, we intend to use time-varying exposures in quad-Bayer patterned sensors. This approach allows long-exposure pixels to receive more photon energy than short- or middle-exposure pixels, resulting in higher-quality HDR images. However, time-varying exposures are not ideal for dynamic scenes and require an additional deghosting method. To tackle this issue, we propose a single-shot HDR demosaicing method that takes time-varying multiple exposures as input and jointly solves both the demosaicing and deghosting problems. Our method uses a feature-extraction module to handle mosaiced multiple exposures and a multiscale transformer module to register spatial displacements of multiple exposures and colors. We also created a dataset of quad-Bayer sensor input with time-varying exposures and trained our network using this dataset. Results demonstrate that our method outperforms baseline HDR reconstruction methods with both synthetic and real datasets. With our method, we can achieve high-quality HDR images in challenging lighting conditions.
This paper addresses the problem of ranking pre-trained models for object detection and image classification. Selecting the best pre-trained model by fine-tuning is an expensive and time-consuming task. Previous works have proposed transferability estimation based on features extracted by the pre-trained models. We argue that quantifying whether the target dataset is in-distribution (IND) or out-of-distribution (OOD) for the pre-trained model is an important factor in the transferability estimation. To this end, we propose ETran, an energy-based transferability assessment metric, which includes three scores: 1) energy score, 2) classification score, and 3) regression score. We use energy-based models to determine whether the target dataset is OOD or IND for the pre-trained model. In contrast to the prior works, ETran is applicable to a wide range of tasks including classification, regression, and object detection (classification+regression). This is the first work that proposes transferability estimation for object detection task. Our extensive experiments on four benchmarks and two tasks show that ETran outperforms previous works on object detection and classification benchmarks by an average of 21% and 12%, respectively, and achieves SOTA in transferability assessment.
Despite being highly performant, deep neural networks might base their decisions on features that spuriously correlate with the provided labels, thus hurting generalization. To mitigate this, 'model guidance' has recently gained popularity, i.e. the idea of regularizing the models' explanations to ensure that they are "right for the right reasons". While various techniques to achieve such model guidance have been proposed, experimental validation of these approaches has thus far been limited to relatively simple and / or synthetic datasets. To better understand the effectiveness of the various design choices that have been explored in the context of model guidance, in this work we conduct an in-depth evaluation across various loss functions, attribution methods, models, and 'guidance depths' on the PASCAL VOC 2007 and MS COCO 2014 datasets. As annotation costs for model guidance can limit its applicability, we also place a particular focus on efficiency. Specifically, we guide the models via bounding box annotations, which are much cheaper to obtain than the commonly used segmentation masks, and evaluate the robustness of model guidance under limited (e.g. with only 1% of annotated images) or overly coarse annotations. Further, we propose using the EPG score as an additional evaluation metric and loss function ('Energy loss'). We show that optimizing for the Energy loss leads to models that exhibit a distinct focus on object-specific features, despite only using bounding box annotations that also include background regions. Lastly, we show that such model guidance can improve generalization under distribution shifts. Code available at: https://github.com/sukrutrao/Model-Guidance