论文检索

Applications/Neuroscience, Cognitive Science

Zihang Shao, Xuanye Fang, Yaxin Li, Chaoran Feng, Jiangrong Shen, Qi Xu

Spiking neural networks (SNNs) have undergone continuous development and extensive study for decades, leading to increased biological plausibility and optimal energy efficiency. However, traditional training methods for deep SNNs have some limitations, as they rely on strategies such as pre-training and fine-tuning, indirect coding and reconstruction, and approximate gradients. These strategies lack a complete training model and require gradient approximation. To overcome these limitations, we propose a novel learning method named Joint Excitatory Inhibitory Cycle Iteration learning for Deep Spiking Neural Networks (EICIL) that integrates both excitatory and inhibitory behaviors inspired by the signal transmission of biological neurons.By organically embedding these two behavior patterns into one framework, the proposed EICIL significantly improves the bio-mimicry and adaptability of spiking neuron models, as well as expands the representation space of spiking neurons. Extensive experiments based on EICIL and traditional learning methods demonstrate that EICIL outperforms traditional methods on various datasets, such as CIFAR10 and CIFAR100, revealing the crucial role of the learning approach that integrates both behaviors during training.

Applications/Chemistry and Drug Discovery

Filip Ekström Kelvinius, Dimitar Georgiev, Artur Toshev, Johannes Gasteiger

Recent advances in graph neural networks (GNNs) have enabled more comprehensive modeling of molecules and molecular systems, thereby enhancing the precision of molecular property prediction and molecular simulations. Nonetheless, as the field has been progressing to bigger and more complex architectures, state-of-the-art GNNs have become largely prohibitive for many large-scale applications. In this paper, we explore the utility of knowledge distillation (KD) for accelerating molecular GNNs. To this end, we devise KD strategies that facilitate the distillation of hidden representations in directional and equivariant GNNs, and evaluate their performance on the regression task of energy and force prediction. We validate our protocols across different teacher-student configurations and datasets, and demonstrate that they can consistently boost the predictive accuracy of student models without any modifications to their architecture. Moreover, we conduct comprehensive optimization of various components of our framework, and investigate the potential of data augmentation to further enhance performance. All in all, we manage to close the gap in predictive accuracy between teacher and student models by as much as 96.7\% and 62.5\% for energy and force prediction respectively, while fully preserving the inference throughput of the more lightweight models.

Applications/Physics

Kirill Neklyudov, Jannes Nys, Luca Thiede, Juan Carrasquilla, Qiang Liu, Max Welling, Alireza Makhzani

Solving the quantum many-body Schrödinger equation is a fundamental and challenging problem in the fields of quantum physics, quantum chemistry, and material sciences. One of the common computational approaches to this problem is Quantum Variational Monte Carlo (QVMC), in which ground-state solutions are obtained by minimizing the energy of the system within a restricted family of parameterized wave functions. Deep learning methods partially address the limitations of traditional QVMC by representing a rich family of wave functions in terms of neural networks. However, the optimization objective in QVMC remains notoriously hard to minimize and requires second-order optimization methods such as natural gradient. In this paper, we first reformulate energy functional minimization in the space of Born distributions corresponding to particle-permutation (anti-)symmetric wave functions, rather than the space of wave functions. We then interpret QVMC as the Fisher--Rao gradient flow in this distributional space, followed by a projection step onto the variational manifold. This perspective provides us with a principled framework to derive new QMC algorithms, by endowing the distributional space with better metrics, and following the projected gradient flow induced by those metrics. More specifically, we propose "Wasserstein Quantum Monte Carlo" (WQMC), which uses the gradient flow induced by the Wasserstein metric, rather than the Fisher--Rao metric, and corresponds to *transporting* the probability mass, rather than *teleporting* it. We demonstrate empirically that the dynamics of WQMC results in faster convergence to the ground state of molecular systems.

Applications/Chemistry and Drug Discovery

Phillip Pope, David Jacobs

The Kohn-Sham equations underlie many important applications such as the discovery of new catalysts. Recent machine learning work on catalyst modeling has focused on prediction of the energy, but has so far not yet demonstrated significant out-of-distribution generalization. Here we investigate another approach based on the pointwise learning of the Kohn-Sham charge-density. On a new dataset of bulk catalysts with charge densities, we show density models can generalize to new structures with combinations of elements not seen at train time, a form of combinatorial generalization. We show that over 80% of binary and ternary test cases achieve faster convergence than standard baselines in Density Functional Theory, amounting to an average reduction of 13% in the number of iterations required to reach convergence, which may be of independent interest. Our results suggest that density learning is a viable alternative, trading greater inference costs for a step towards combinatorial generalization, a key property for applications.

Deep Learning/Graph Neural Networks

Anthony Gruber, Kookjin Lee, Nathaniel Trask

Recent works have shown that physics-inspired architectures allow the training of deep graph neural networks (GNNs) without oversmoothing. The role of these physics is unclear, however, with successful examples of both reversible (e.g., Hamiltonian) and irreversible (e.g., diffusion) phenomena producing comparable results despite diametrically opposed mechanisms, and further complications arising due to empirical departures from mathematical theory. This work presents a series of novel GNN architectures based upon structure-preserving bracket-based dynamical systems, which are provably guaranteed to either conserve energy or generate positive dissipation with increasing depth. It is shown that the theoretically principled framework employed here allows for inherently explainable constructions, which contextualize departures from theory in current architectures and better elucidate the roles of reversibility and irreversibility in network performance. Code is available at the Github repository \url{https://github.com/natrask/BracketGraphs}.

Optimization/Bilevel optimization

Benjamin Scellier, Maxence Ernoult, Jack Kendall, Suhas Kumar

Energy-based learning algorithms have recently gained a surge of interest due to their compatibility with analog (post-digital) hardware. Existing algorithms include contrastive learning (CL), equilibrium propagation (EP) and coupled learning (CpL), all consisting in contrasting two states, and differing in the type of perturbation used to obtain the second state from the first one. However, these algorithms have never been explicitly compared on equal footing with same models and datasets, making it difficult to assess their scalability and decide which one to select in practice. In this work, we carry out a comparison of seven learning algorithms, namely CL and different variants of EP and CpL depending on the signs of the perturbations. Specifically, using these learning algorithms, we train deep convolutional Hopfield networks (DCHNs) on five vision tasks (MNIST, F-MNIST, SVHN, CIFAR-10 and CIFAR-100). We find that, while all algorithms yield comparable performance on MNIST, important differences in performance arise as the difficulty of the task increases. Our key findings reveal that negative perturbations are better than positive ones, and highlight the centered variant of EP (which uses two perturbations of opposite sign) as the best-performing algorithm. We also endorse these findings with theoretical arguments. Additionally, we establish new SOTA results with DCHNs on all five datasets, both in performance and speed. In particular, our DCHN simulations are 13.5 times faster with respect to Laborieux et al. (2021), which we achieve thanks to the use of a novel energy minimisation algorithm based on asynchronous updates, combined with reduced precision (16 bits).

Probabilistic Methods/Bayesian Models and Methods

Xingsi Dong, Si Wu

Bayesian brain theory suggests that the brain employs generative models to understand the external world. The sampling-based perspective posits that the brain infers the posterior distribution through samples of stochastic neuronal responses. Additionally, the brain continually updates its generative model to approach the true distribution of the external world. In this study, we introduce the Hierarchical Exponential-family Energy-based (HEE) model, which captures the dynamics of inference and learning. In the HEE model, we decompose the partition function into individual layers and leverage a group of neurons with shorter time constants to sample the gradient of the decomposed normalization term. This allows our model to estimate the partition function and perform inference simultaneously, circumventing the negative phase encountered in conventional energy-based models (EBMs). As a result, the learning process is localized both in time and space, and the model is easy to converge. To match the brain's rapid computation, we demonstrate that neural adaptation can serve as a momentum term, significantly accelerating the inference process. On natural image datasets, our model exhibits representations akin to those observed in the biological visual system. Furthermore, for the machine learning community, our model can generate observations through joint or marginal generation. We show that marginal generation outperforms joint generation and achieves performance on par with other EBMs.

Yu Tian, Yuyuan Liu, Guansong Pang, Fengbei Liu, Yuanhong Chen, Gustavo Carneiro

State-of-the-art (SOTA) anomaly segmentation approaches on complex urban driving scenes explore pixel-wise classification uncertainty learned from outlier exposure, or external reconstruction models. However, previous uncertainty approaches that directly associate high uncertainty to anomaly may sometimes lead to incorrect anomaly predictions, and external reconstruction models tend to be too inefficient for real-time self-driving embedded systems. In this paper, we propose a new anomaly segmentation method, named pixel-wise energy-biased abstention learning (PEBAL), that explores pixel-wise abstention learning (AL) with a model that learns an adaptive pixel-level anomaly class, and an energy-based model (EBM) that learns inlier pixel distribution. More specifically, PEBAL is based on a non-trivial joint training of EBM and AL, where EBM is trained to output high-energy for anomaly pixels (from outlier exposure) and AL is trained such that these high-energy pixels receive adaptive low penalty for being included to the anomaly class. We extensively evaluate PEBAL against the SOTA and show that it achieves the best performance across four benchmarks.

Jason Y. Zhang, Deva Ramanan, Shubham Tulsiani

We describe a data-driven method for inferring the camera viewpoints given multiple images of an arbitrary object. This task is a core component of classic geometric pipelines such as SfM and SLAM, and also serves as a vital pre-processing requirement for contemporary neural approaches (e.g. NeRF) to object reconstruction and view synthesis. In contrast to existing correspondence-driven methods that do not perform well given sparse views, we propose a top-down prediction based approach for estimating camera viewpoints. Our key technical insight is the use of an energy-based formulation for representing distributions over relative camera rotations, thus allowing us to explicitly represent multiple camera modes arising from object symmetries or views. Leveraging these relative predictions, we jointly estimate a consistent set of camera rotations from multiple images. We show that our approach outperforms state-of-the-art SfM and SLAM methods given sparse images on both seen and unseen categories. Further, our probabilistic approach significantly outperforms directly regressing relative poses, suggesting that modeling multimodality is important for coherent joint reconstruction. We demonstrate that our system can be a stepping stone toward in-the-wild reconstruction from multi-view datasets. The project page with code and videos can be found at https://jasonyzhang.com/relpose.

Wentong Li, Wenyu Liu, Jianke Zhu, Miaomiao Cui, Xian-Sheng Hua, Lei Zhang

In contrast to the fully supervised methods using pixel-wise mask labels, box-supervised instance segmentation takes advantage of the simple box annotations, which has recently attracted a lot of research attentions. In this paper, we propose a novel single-shot box-supervised instance segmentation approach, which integrates the classical level set model with deep neural network delicately. Specifically, our proposed method iteratively learns a series of level sets through a continuous Chan-Vese energy-based function in an end-to-end fashion. A simple mask supervised SOLOv2 model is adapted to predict the instance-aware mask map as the level set for each instance. Both the input image and its deep features are employed as the input data to evolve the level set curves, where a box projection function is employed to obtain the initial boundary. By minimizing the fully differentiable energy function, the level set for each instance is iteratively optimized within its corresponding bounding box annotation. The experimental results on four challenging benchmarks demonstrate the leading performance of our proposed approach to robust instance segmentation in various scenarios. The code is available at: https://github.com/LiWentomng/boxlevelset.

Kangcheng Liu, Yuzhi Zhao, Qiang Nie, Zhi Gao, Ben M. Chen

Current state-of-the-art 3D scene understanding methods are merely designed in a full-supervised way. However, in the limited reconstruction cases, only limited 3D scenes can be reconstructed and annotated. We are in need of a framework that can concurrently be applied to 3D point cloud semantic segmentation and instance segmentation, particularly in circumstances where labels are rather scarce. The paper introduces an effective approach to tackle the 3D scene understanding problem when labeled scenes are limited. To leverage the boundary information, we propose a novel energy-based loss with boundary awareness benefiting from the region-level boundary labels predicted by the boundary prediction network. To encourage latent instance discrimination and guarantee efficiency, we propose the first unsupervised region-level semantic contrastive learning scheme for point clouds, which uses confident predictions of the network to discriminate the intermediate feature embeddings in multiple stages. In the limited reconstruction case, our proposed approach, termed WS3D, has pioneer performance on the large-scale ScanNet on semantic segmentation and instance segmentation. Also, our proposed WS3D achieves state-of-the-art performance on the other indoor and outdoor datasets S3DIS and SemanticKITTI.

Youngeun Kim, Yuhang Li, Hyoungseob Park, Yeshwanth Venkatesha, Priyadarshini Panda

Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) have gained huge attention as a potential energy-efficient alternative to conventional Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs) due to their inherent high-sparsity activation. However, most prior SNN methods use ANN-like architectures (e.g., VGG-Net or ResNet), which could provide sub-optimal performance for temporal sequence processing of binary information in SNNs. To address this, in this paper, we introduce a novel Neural Architecture Search (NAS) approach for finding better SNN architectures. Inspired by recent NAS approaches that find the optimal architecture from activation patterns at initialization, we select the architecture that can represent diverse spike activation patterns across different data samples without training. Moreover, to further leverage the temporal information among the spikes, we search for feed forward connections as well as backward connections (i.e., temporal feedback connections) between layers. Interestingly, SNASNet found by our search algorithm achieves higher performance with backward connections, demonstrating the importance of designing SNN architecture for suitably using temporal information. We conduct extensive experiments on three image recognition benchmarks where we show that SNASNet achieves state-of-the-art performance with significantly lower timesteps (5 timesteps). Code is available at Github.

Markus Hofinger, Erich Kobler, Alexander Effland, Thomas Pock

In this paper, we propose a novel method for color propagation that is used to recolor gray-scale videos (e.g. historic movies). Our energy-based model combines deep learning with a variational formulation. At its core, the method optimizes over a set of plausible color proposals that are extracted from motion and semantic feature matches, together with a learned regularizer that resolves color ambiguities by enforcing spatial color smoothness. Our approach allows interpreting intermediate results and to incorporate extensions like using multiple reference frames even after training. We achieve state-of-the-art results on a number of standard benchmark datasets with multiple metrics and also provide convincing results on real historical videos - even though such types of video are not present during training. Moreover, a user evaluation shows that our method propagates initial colors more faithfully and temporally consistent.

Vishwanath Saragadam, Jasper Tan, Guha Balakrishnan, Richard G. Baraniuk, Ashok Veeraraghavan

We introduce a new neural signal model designed for efficient high-resolution representation of large-scale signals. The key innovation in our multiscale implicit neural representation (MINER) is an internal representation via a Laplacian pyramid, which provides a sparse multiscale decomposition of the signal that captures orthogonal parts of the signal across scales. We leverage the advantages of the Laplacian pyramid by representing small disjoint patches of the pyramid at each scale with a small MLP. This enables the capacity of the network to adaptively increase from coarse to fine scales, and only represent parts of the signal with strong signal energy. The parameters of each MLP are optimized from coarse-to-fine scale which results in faster approximations at coarser scales, thereby ultimately an extremely fast training process. We apply MINER to a range of large-scale signal representation tasks, including gigapixel images and very large point clouds, and demonstrate that it requires fewer than 25% of the parameters, 33% of the memory footprint, and 10% of the computation time of competing techniques such as ACORN to reach the same representation accuracy.

Vlas Zyrianov, Xiyue Zhu, Shenlong Wang

We present LiDARGen, a novel, effective, and controllable generative model that produces realistic LiDAR point cloud sensory readings. Our method leverages the powerful score-matching energy-based model and formulates the point cloud generation process as a stochastic denoising process in the equirectangular view. This model allows us to sample diverse and high-quality point cloud samples with guaranteed physical feasibility and controllability. We validate the effectiveness of our method on the challenging KITTI-360 and NuScenes datasets. The quantitative and qualitative results show that our approach produces more realistic samples than other generative models. Furthermore, LiDARGen can sample point clouds conditioned on inputs without retraining. We demonstrate that our proposed generative model could be directly used to densify LiDAR point clouds.

Vasyl Borsuk, Roman Vei, Orest Kupyn, Tetiana Martyniuk, Igor Krashenyi, Jiři Matas

We present FEAR, a family of fast, efficient, accurate, and robust Siamese visual trackers. We present a novel and efficient way to benefit from dual-template representation for object model adaption, which incorporates temporal information with only a single learnable parameter. We further improve the tracker architecture with a pixel-wise fusion block. By plugging-in sophisticated backbones with the abovementioned modules, FEAR-M and FEAR-L trackers surpass most Siamese trackers on several academic benchmarks in both accuracy and efficiency. Employed with the lightweight backbone, the optimized version FEAR-XS offers more than 10 times faster tracking than current Siamese trackers while maintaining near state-of-the-art results. FEAR-XS tracker is 2.4x smaller and 4.3x faster than LightTrack with superior accuracy. In addition, we expand the definition of the model efficiency by introducing FEAR benchmark that assesses energy consumption and execution speed. We show that energy consumption is a limiting factor for trackers on mobile devices. Source code, pretrained models, and evaluation protocol are available at https://github.com/PinataFarms/FEARTracker.

Fei Li, Lingfeng Shen, Yang Mi, Zhenbo Li

Image restoration aims to recover images from spatially-varying degradation. Most existing image-restoration models employed static CNN-based models, where the fixed learned filters cannot fit the diverse degradation well. To address this, in this paper, we propose a novel Dynamic Image Restoration Contrastive Network (DRCNet). The principal block in DRCNet is theDynamic Filter Restoration module (DFR), which mainly consists of the spatial filter branch and the energy-based attention branch. Specifically, the spatial filter branch suppresses spatial noise for varying spatial degradation; the energy-based attention branch guides the feature integration for better spatial detail recovery. To make degraded images and clean images more distinctive in the representation space, we develop a novel Intra-class Contrastive Regularization (Intra-CR) to serve as a constraint in the solution space for DRCNet. Meanwhile, our theoretical derivation proved Intra-CR owns less sensitivity towards hyper-parameter selection than previous contrastive regularization. DRCNet achieves state-of-the-art results on the ten widely-used benchmarks in image restoration. Besides, we conduct ablation studies to show the effectiveness of the DFR module and Intra-CR, respectively.

Nan Liu, Shuang Li, Yilun Du, Antonio Torralba, Joshua B. Tenenbaum

Large text-guided diffusion models, such as DALLE-2, are able to generate stunning photorealistic images given natural language descriptions. While such models are highly flexible, they struggle to understand the composition of certain concepts, such as confusing the attributes of different objects or relations between objects. In this paper, we propose an alternative structured approach for compositional generation using diffusion models. An image is generated by composing a set of diffusion models, with each of them modeling a certain component of the image. To do this, we interpret diffusion models as energy-based models in which the data distributions defined by the energy functions may be explicitly combined. The proposed method can generate scenes at test time that are substantially more complex than those seen in training, composing sentence descriptions, object relations, human facial attributes, and even generalizing to new combinations that are rarely seen in the real world. We further illustrate how our approach may be used to compose pre-trained text-guided diffusion models and generate photorealistic images containing all the details described in the input descriptions, including the binding of certain object attributes that have been shown difficult for DALLE-2. These results point to the effectiveness of the proposed method in promoting structured generalization for visual generation.

Ahmet Caner Yüzügüler, Nikolaos Dimitriadis, Pascal Frossard

Optimizing resource utilization in target platforms is key to achieving high performance during DNN inference. While optimizations have been proposed for inference latency, memory footprint, and energy consumption, prior hardware-aware neural architecture search (NAS) methods have omitted resource utilization, preventing DNNs to take full advantage of the target inference platforms. Modeling resource utilization efficiently and accurately is challenging, especially for widely-used array-based inference accelerators such as Google TPU. In this work, we propose a novel hardware-aware NAS framework that does not only optimize for task accuracy and inference latency, but also for resource utilization. We also propose and validate a new computational model for resource utilization in inference accelerators. By using the proposed NAS framework and the proposed resource utilization model, we achieve 2.8 - 4x speedup for DNN inference compared to prior hardware-aware NAS methods while attaining similar or improved accuracy in image classification on CIFAR-10 and Imagenet-100 datasets.

Yufei Guo, Liwen Zhang, Yuanpei Chen, Xinyi Tong, Xiaode Liu, YingLei Wang, Xuhui Huang, Zhe Ma

Brain-inspired spiking neural networks (SNNs) have recently drawn more and more attention due to their event-driven and energy efficient characteristics. The integration of storage and computation paradigm on neuromorphic hardwares makes SNNs much different from Deep Neural Networks (DNNs). In this paper, we argue that SNNs may not benefit from the weight-sharing mechanism, which can effectively reduce parameters and improve inference efficiency in DNNs, in some hardwares, and assume that an SNN with unshared convolution kernels could perform better. Motivated by this assumption, a training-inference decoupling method for SNNs named as Real Spike is proposed, which not only enjoys both unshared convolution kernels and binary spikes in inference time but also aintains both shared convolution kernels and Real-valued Spikes during training. This decoupling mechanism of SNN is realized by a re-parameterization technique. Furthermore, based on the training-inference-decoupled idea, a series of other ways for constructing Real Spike on different levels are presented, which also enjoy shared convolutions in the inference and are friendly to both neuromorphic and non-neuromorphic hardware platforms. A theoretical proof is given to clarify that the Real Spike-based SNN network is superior to its vanilla counterpart. Experimental results show that all different Real Spike versions can consistently improve the SNN performance. Moreover, the proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art models on both non-spiking static and neuromorphic datasets.