arXiv subjects

Hyoungseob Park

Publications and source records attributed to Hyoungseob Park.

28 records · Page 2Linked to original sources

arXiv2023

Uncovering the Representation of Spiking Neural Networks Trained with Surrogate Gradient

Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) are recognized as the candidate for the next-generation neural networks due to their bio-plausibility and energy efficiency. Recently, researchers have demonstrated that SNNs are able to achieve nearly state-of-the-art performance in image recognition tasks using surrogate gradient training. However, some essential questions exist pertaining to SNNs that are little studied: Do SNNs trained with surrogate gradient learn different representations from traditional Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs)? Does the time dimension in SNNs provide unique representation power? In this paper, we aim to answer these questions by conducting a representation similarity analysis between SNNs and ANNs using Centered Kernel Alignment (CKA). We start by analyzing the spatial dimension of the networks, including both the width and the depth. Furthermore, our analysis of residual connections shows that SNNs learn a periodic pattern, which rectifies the representations in SNNs to be ANN-like. We additionally investigate the effect of the time dimension on SNN representation, finding that deeper layers encourage more dynamics along the time dimension. We also investigate the impact of input data such as event-stream data and adversarial attacks. Our work uncovers a host of new findings of representations in SNNs. We hope this work will inspire future research to fully comprehend the representation power of SNNs. Code is released at https://github.com/Intelligent-Computing-Lab-Yale/SNNCKA.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2022

Exploring Temporal Information Dynamics in Spiking Neural Networks

Most existing Spiking Neural Network (SNN) works state that SNNs may utilize temporal information dynamics of spikes. However, an explicit analysis of temporal information dynamics is still missing. In this paper, we ask several important questions for providing a fundamental understanding of SNNs: What are temporal information dynamics inside SNNs? How can we measure the temporal information dynamics? How do the temporal information dynamics affect the overall learning performance? To answer these questions, we estimate the Fisher Information of the weights to measure the distribution of temporal information during training in an empirical manner. Surprisingly, as training goes on, Fisher information starts to concentrate in the early timesteps. After training, we observe that information becomes highly concentrated in earlier few timesteps, a phenomenon we refer to as temporal information concentration. We observe that the temporal information concentration phenomenon is a common learning feature of SNNs by conducting extensive experiments on various configurations such as architecture, dataset, optimization strategy, time constant, and timesteps. Furthermore, to reveal how temporal information concentration affects the performance of SNNs, we design a loss function to change the trend of temporal information. We find that temporal information concentration is crucial to building a robust SNN but has little effect on classification accuracy. Finally, we propose an efficient iterative pruning method based on our observation on temporal information concentration. Code is available at https://github.com/Intelligent-Computing-Lab-Yale/Exploring-Temporal-Information-Dynamics-in-Spiking-Neural-Networks.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2022

Wearable-based Human Activity Recognition with Spatio-Temporal Spiking Neural Networks

We study the Human Activity Recognition (HAR) task, which predicts user daily activity based on time series data from wearable sensors. Recently, researchers use end-to-end Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs) to extract the features and perform classification in HAR. However, ANNs pose a huge computation burden on wearable devices and lack temporal feature extraction. In this work, we leverage Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs)--an architecture inspired by biological neurons--to HAR tasks. SNNs allow spatio-temporal extraction of features and enjoy low-power computation with binary spikes. We conduct extensive experiments on three HAR datasets with SNNs, demonstrating that SNNs are on par with ANNs in terms of accuracy while reducing up to 94% energy consumption. The code is publicly available in https://github.com/Intelligent-Computing-Lab-Yale/SNN_HAR

cs.NE↗

arXiv2022

Neural Architecture Search for Spiking Neural Networks

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.

cs.NE↗

arXiv2022

Neuromorphic Data Augmentation for Training Spiking Neural Networks

Developing neuromorphic intelligence on event-based datasets with Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) has recently attracted much research attention. However, the limited size of event-based datasets makes SNNs prone to overfitting and unstable convergence. This issue remains unexplored by previous academic works. In an effort to minimize this generalization gap, we propose Neuromorphic Data Augmentation (NDA), a family of geometric augmentations specifically designed for event-based datasets with the goal of significantly stabilizing the SNN training and reducing the generalization gap between training and test performance. The proposed method is simple and compatible with existing SNN training pipelines. Using the proposed augmentation, for the first time, we demonstrate the feasibility of unsupervised contrastive learning for SNNs. We conduct comprehensive experiments on prevailing neuromorphic vision benchmarks and show that NDA yields substantial improvements over previous state-of-the-art results. For example, the NDA-based SNN achieves accuracy gain on CIFAR10-DVS and N-Caltech 101 by 10.1% and 13.7%, respectively. Code is available on GitHub https://github.com/Intelligent-Computing-Lab-Yale/NDA_SNN

cs.CV↗

arXiv2022

Exploring Lottery Ticket Hypothesis in Spiking Neural Networks

Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) have recently emerged as a new generation of low-power deep neural networks, which is suitable to be implemented on low-power mobile/edge devices. As such devices have limited memory storage, neural pruning on SNNs has been widely explored in recent years. Most existing SNN pruning works focus on shallow SNNs (2~6 layers), however, deeper SNNs (>16 layers) are proposed by state-of-the-art SNN works, which is difficult to be compatible with the current SNN pruning work. To scale up a pruning technique towards deep SNNs, we investigate Lottery Ticket Hypothesis (LTH) which states that dense networks contain smaller subnetworks (i.e., winning tickets) that achieve comparable performance to the dense networks. Our studies on LTH reveal that the winning tickets consistently exist in deep SNNs across various datasets and architectures, providing up to 97% sparsity without huge performance degradation. However, the iterative searching process of LTH brings a huge training computational cost when combined with the multiple timesteps of SNNs. To alleviate such heavy searching cost, we propose Early-Time (ET) ticket where we find the important weight connectivity from a smaller number of timesteps. The proposed ET ticket can be seamlessly combined with a common pruning techniques for finding winning tickets, such as Iterative Magnitude Pruning (IMP) and Early-Bird (EB) tickets. Our experiment results show that the proposed ET ticket reduces search time by up to 38% compared to IMP or EB methods. Code is available at Github.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2022

Rate Coding or Direct Coding: Which One is Better for Accurate, Robust, and Energy-efficient Spiking Neural Networks?

Recent Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) works focus on an image classification task, therefore various coding techniques have been proposed to convert an image into temporal binary spikes. Among them, rate coding and direct coding are regarded as prospective candidates for building a practical SNN system as they show state-of-the-art performance on large-scale datasets. Despite their usage, there is little attention to comparing these two coding schemes in a fair manner. In this paper, we conduct a comprehensive analysis of the two codings from three perspectives: accuracy, adversarial robustness, and energy-efficiency. First, we compare the performance of two coding techniques with various architectures and datasets. Then, we measure the robustness of the coding techniques on two adversarial attack methods. Finally, we compare the energy-efficiency of two coding schemes on a digital hardware platform. Our results show that direct coding can achieve better accuracy especially for a small number of timesteps. In contrast, rate coding shows better robustness to adversarial attacks owing to the non-differentiable spike generation process. Rate coding also yields higher energy-efficiency than direct coding which requires multi-bit precision for the first layer. Our study explores the characteristics of two codings, which is an important design consideration for building SNNs. The code is made available at https://github.com/Intelligent-Computing-Lab-Yale/Rate-vs-Direct.

cs.NE↗

arXiv2022

Addressing Client Drift in Federated Continual Learning with Adaptive Optimization

Federated learning has been extensively studied and is the prevalent method for privacy-preserving distributed learning in edge devices. Correspondingly, continual learning is an emerging field targeted towards learning multiple tasks sequentially. However, there is little attention towards additional challenges emerging when federated aggregation is performed in a continual learning system. We identify \textit{client drift} as one of the key weaknesses that arise when vanilla federated averaging is applied in such a system, especially since each client can independently have different order of tasks. We outline a framework for performing Federated Continual Learning (FCL) by using NetTailor as a candidate continual learning approach and show the extent of the problem of client drift. We show that adaptive federated optimization can reduce the adverse impact of client drift and showcase its effectiveness on CIFAR100, MiniImagenet, and Decathlon benchmarks. Further, we provide an empirical analysis highlighting the interplay between different hyperparameters such as client and server learning rates, the number of local training iterations, and communication rounds. Finally, we evaluate our framework on useful characteristics of federated learning systems such as scalability, robustness to the skewness in clients' data distribution, and stragglers.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2021

Meta Batch-Instance Normalization for Generalizable Person Re-Identification

Although supervised person re-identification (Re-ID) methods have shown impressive performance, they suffer from a poor generalization capability on unseen domains. Therefore, generalizable Re-ID has recently attracted growing attention. Many existing methods have employed an instance normalization technique to reduce style variations, but the loss of discriminative information could not be avoided. In this paper, we propose a novel generalizable Re-ID framework, named Meta Batch-Instance Normalization (MetaBIN). Our main idea is to generalize normalization layers by simulating unsuccessful generalization scenarios beforehand in the meta-learning pipeline. To this end, we combine learnable batch-instance normalization layers with meta-learning and investigate the challenging cases caused by both batch and instance normalization layers. Moreover, we diversify the virtual simulations via our meta-train loss accompanied by a cyclic inner-updating manner to boost generalization capability. After all, the MetaBIN framework prevents our model from overfitting to the given source styles and improves the generalization capability to unseen domains without additional data augmentation or complicated network design. Extensive experimental results show that our model outperforms the state-of-the-art methods on the large-scale domain generalization Re-ID benchmark and the cross-domain Re-ID problem. The source code is available at: https://github.com/bismex/MetaBIN.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2020

Robust Federated Learning with Noisy Labels

Federated learning is a paradigm that enables local devices to jointly train a server model while keeping the data decentralized and private. In federated learning, since local data are collected by clients, it is hardly guaranteed that the data are correctly annotated. Although a lot of studies have been conducted to train the networks robust to these noisy data in a centralized setting, these algorithms still suffer from noisy labels in federated learning. Compared to the centralized setting, clients' data can have different noise distributions due to variations in their labeling systems or background knowledge of users. As a result, local models form inconsistent decision boundaries and their weights severely diverge from each other, which are serious problems in federated learning. To solve these problems, we introduce a novel federated learning scheme that the server cooperates with local models to maintain consistent decision boundaries by interchanging class-wise centroids. These centroids are central features of local data on each device, which are aligned by the server every communication round. Updating local models with the aligned centroids helps to form consistent decision boundaries among local models, although the noise distributions in clients' data are different from each other. To improve local model performance, we introduce a novel approach to select confident samples that are used for updating the model with given labels. Furthermore, we propose a global-guided pseudo-labeling method to update labels of unconfident samples by exploiting the global model. Our experimental results on the noisy CIFAR-10 dataset and the Clothing1M dataset show that our approach is noticeably effective in federated learning with noisy labels.

cs.LG↗