arXiv subjects

Kaisheng Ma

Publications and source records attributed to Kaisheng Ma.

52 records · Page 3Linked to original sources

arXiv2022

PointDistiller: Structured Knowledge Distillation Towards Efficient and Compact 3D Detection

The remarkable breakthroughs in point cloud representation learning have boosted their usage in real-world applications such as self-driving cars and virtual reality. However, these applications usually have an urgent requirement for not only accurate but also efficient 3D object detection. Recently, knowledge distillation has been proposed as an effective model compression technique, which transfers the knowledge from an over-parameterized teacher to a lightweight student and achieves consistent effectiveness in 2D vision. However, due to point clouds' sparsity and irregularity, directly applying previous image-based knowledge distillation methods to point cloud detectors usually leads to unsatisfactory performance. To fill the gap, this paper proposes PointDistiller, a structured knowledge distillation framework for point clouds-based 3D detection. Concretely, PointDistiller includes local distillation which extracts and distills the local geometric structure of point clouds with dynamic graph convolution and reweighted learning strategy, which highlights student learning on the crucial points or voxels to improve knowledge distillation efficiency. Extensive experiments on both voxels-based and raw points-based detectors have demonstrated the effectiveness of our method over seven previous knowledge distillation methods. For instance, our 4X compressed PointPillars student achieves 2.8 and 3.4 mAP improvements on BEV and 3D object detection, outperforming its teacher by 0.9 and 1.8 mAP, respectively. Codes have been released at https://github.com/RunpeiDong/PointDistiller.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2022

Unsupervised Deep Learning Meets Chan-Vese Model

The Chan-Vese (CV) model is a classic region-based method in image segmentation. However, its piecewise constant assumption does not always hold for practical applications. Many improvements have been proposed but the issue is still far from well solved. In this work, we propose an unsupervised image segmentation approach that integrates the CV model with deep neural networks, which significantly improves the original CV model's segmentation accuracy. Our basic idea is to apply a deep neural network that maps the image into a latent space to alleviate the violation of the piecewise constant assumption in image space. We formulate this idea under the classic Bayesian framework by approximating the likelihood with an evidence lower bound (ELBO) term while keeping the prior term in the CV model. Thus, our model only needs the input image itself and does not require pre-training from external datasets. Moreover, we extend the idea to multi-phase case and dataset based unsupervised image segmentation. Extensive experiments validate the effectiveness of our model and show that the proposed method is noticeably better than other unsupervised segmentation approaches.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2022

Wavelet Knowledge Distillation: Towards Efficient Image-to-Image Translation

Remarkable achievements have been attained with Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) in image-to-image translation. However, due to a tremendous amount of parameters, state-of-the-art GANs usually suffer from low efficiency and bulky memory usage. To tackle this challenge, firstly, this paper investigates GANs performance from a frequency perspective. The results show that GANs, especially small GANs lack the ability to generate high-quality high frequency information. To address this problem, we propose a novel knowledge distillation method referred to as wavelet knowledge distillation. Instead of directly distilling the generated images of teachers, wavelet knowledge distillation first decomposes the images into different frequency bands with discrete wavelet transformation and then only distills the high frequency bands. As a result, the student GAN can pay more attention to its learning on high frequency bands. Experiments demonstrate that our method leads to 7.08 times compression and 6.80 times acceleration on CycleGAN with almost no performance drop. Additionally, we have studied the relation between discriminators and generators which shows that the compression of discriminators can promote the performance of compressed generators.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2021

AFEC: Active Forgetting of Negative Transfer in Continual Learning

Continual learning aims to learn a sequence of tasks from dynamic data distributions. Without accessing to the old training samples, knowledge transfer from the old tasks to each new task is difficult to determine, which might be either positive or negative. If the old knowledge interferes with the learning of a new task, i.e., the forward knowledge transfer is negative, then precisely remembering the old tasks will further aggravate the interference, thus decreasing the performance of continual learning. By contrast, biological neural networks can actively forget the old knowledge that conflicts with the learning of a new experience, through regulating the learning-triggered synaptic expansion and synaptic convergence. Inspired by the biological active forgetting, we propose to actively forget the old knowledge that limits the learning of new tasks to benefit continual learning. Under the framework of Bayesian continual learning, we develop a novel approach named Active Forgetting with synaptic Expansion-Convergence (AFEC). Our method dynamically expands parameters to learn each new task and then selectively combines them, which is formally consistent with the underlying mechanism of biological active forgetting. We extensively evaluate AFEC on a variety of continual learning benchmarks, including CIFAR-10 regression tasks, visual classification tasks and Atari reinforcement tasks, where AFEC effectively improves the learning of new tasks and achieves the state-of-the-art performance in a plug-and-play way.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2021

Adversarial Robustness vs Model Compression, or Both?

It is well known that deep neural networks (DNNs) are vulnerable to adversarial attacks, which are implemented by adding crafted perturbations onto benign examples. Min-max robust optimization based adversarial training can provide a notion of security against adversarial attacks. However, adversarial robustness requires a significantly larger capacity of the network than that for the natural training with only benign examples. This paper proposes a framework of concurrent adversarial training and weight pruning that enables model compression while still preserving the adversarial robustness and essentially tackles the dilemma of adversarial training. Furthermore, this work studies two hypotheses about weight pruning in the conventional setting and finds that weight pruning is essential for reducing the network model size in the adversarial setting, training a small model from scratch even with inherited initialization from the large model cannot achieve both adversarial robustness and high standard accuracy. Code is available at https://github.com/yeshaokai/Robustness-Aware-Pruning-ADMM.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2020

An Image Enhancing Pattern-based Sparsity for Real-time Inference on Mobile Devices

Weight pruning has been widely acknowledged as a straightforward and effective method to eliminate redundancy in Deep Neural Networks (DNN), thereby achieving acceleration on various platforms. However, most of the pruning techniques are essentially trade-offs between model accuracy and regularity which lead to impaired inference accuracy and limited on-device acceleration performance. To solve the problem, we introduce a new sparsity dimension, namely pattern-based sparsity that comprises pattern and connectivity sparsity, and becoming both highly accurate and hardware friendly. With carefully designed patterns, the proposed pruning unprecedentedly and consistently achieves accuracy enhancement and better feature extraction ability on different DNN structures and datasets, and our pattern-aware pruning framework also achieves pattern library extraction, pattern selection, pattern and connectivity pruning and weight training simultaneously. Our approach on the new pattern-based sparsity naturally fits into compiler optimization for highly efficient DNN execution on mobile platforms. To the best of our knowledge, it is the first time that mobile devices achieve real-time inference for the large-scale DNN models thanks to the unique spatial property of pattern-based sparsity and the help of the code generation capability of compilers.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2020

PCNN: Pattern-based Fine-Grained Regular Pruning towards Optimizing CNN Accelerators

Weight pruning is a powerful technique to realize model compression. We propose PCNN, a fine-grained regular 1D pruning method. A novel index format called Sparsity Pattern Mask (SPM) is presented to encode the sparsity in PCNN. Leveraging SPM with limited pruning patterns and non-zero sequences with equal length, PCNN can be efficiently employed in hardware. Evaluated on VGG-16 and ResNet-18, our PCNN achieves the compression rate up to 8.4X with only 0.2% accuracy loss. We also implement a pattern-aware architecture in 55nm process, achieving up to 9.0X speedup and 28.39 TOPS/W efficiency with only 3.1% on-chip memory overhead of indices.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2020

PCONV: The Missing but Desirable Sparsity in DNN Weight Pruning for Real-time Execution on Mobile Devices

Model compression techniques on Deep Neural Network (DNN) have been widely acknowledged as an effective way to achieve acceleration on a variety of platforms, and DNN weight pruning is a straightforward and effective method. There are currently two mainstreams of pruning methods representing two extremes of pruning regularity: non-structured, fine-grained pruning can achieve high sparsity and accuracy, but is not hardware friendly; structured, coarse-grained pruning exploits hardware-efficient structures in pruning, but suffers from accuracy drop when the pruning rate is high. In this paper, we introduce PCONV, comprising a new sparsity dimension, -- fine-grained pruning patterns inside the coarse-grained structures. PCONV comprises two types of sparsities, Sparse Convolution Patterns (SCP) which is generated from intra-convolution kernel pruning and connectivity sparsity generated from inter-convolution kernel pruning. Essentially, SCP enhances accuracy due to its special vision properties, and connectivity sparsity increases pruning rate while maintaining balanced workload on filter computation. To deploy PCONV, we develop a novel compiler-assisted DNN inference framework and execute PCONV models in real-time without accuracy compromise, which cannot be achieved in prior work. Our experimental results show that, PCONV outperforms three state-of-art end-to-end DNN frameworks, TensorFlow-Lite, TVM, and Alibaba Mobile Neural Network with speedup up to 39.2x, 11.4x, and 6.3x, respectively, with no accuracy loss. Mobile devices can achieve real-time inference on large-scale DNNs.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2020

Exploring Frequency Domain Interpretation of Convolutional Neural Networks

Many existing interpretation methods of convolutional neural networks (CNNs) mainly analyze in spatial domain, yet model interpretability in frequency domain has been rarely studied. To the best of our knowledge, there is no study on the interpretation of modern CNNs from the perspective of the frequency proportion of filters. In this work, we analyze the frequency properties of filters in the first layer as it is the entrance of information and relatively more convenient for analysis. By controlling the proportion of different frequency filters in the training stage, the network classification accuracy and model robustness is evaluated and our results reveal that it has a great impact on the robustness to common corruptions. Moreover, a learnable modulation of frequency proportion with perturbation in power spectrum is proposed from the perspective of frequency domain. Experiments on CIFAR-10-C show 10.97% average robustness gains for ResNet-18 with negligible natural accuracy degradation.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2020

Light-weight Calibrator: a Separable Component for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation

Existing domain adaptation methods aim at learning features that can be generalized among domains. These methods commonly require to update source classifier to adapt to the target domain and do not properly handle the trade off between the source domain and the target domain. In this work, instead of training a classifier to adapt to the target domain, we use a separable component called data calibrator to help the fixed source classifier recover discrimination power in the target domain, while preserving the source domain's performance. When the difference between two domains is small, the source classifier's representation is sufficient to perform well in the target domain and outperforms GAN-based methods in digits. Otherwise, the proposed method can leverage synthetic images generated by GANs to boost performance and achieve state-of-the-art performance in digits datasets and driving scene semantic segmentation. Our method empirically reveals that certain intriguing hints, which can be mitigated by adversarial attack to domain discriminators, are one of the sources for performance degradation under the domain shift.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2020

Non-Structured DNN Weight Pruning -- Is It Beneficial in Any Platform?

Large deep neural network (DNN) models pose the key challenge to energy efficiency due to the significantly higher energy consumption of off-chip DRAM accesses than arithmetic or SRAM operations. It motivates the intensive research on model compression with two main approaches. Weight pruning leverages the redundancy in the number of weights and can be performed in a non-structured, which has higher flexibility and pruning rate but incurs index accesses due to irregular weights, or structured manner, which preserves the full matrix structure with lower pruning rate. Weight quantization leverages the redundancy in the number of bits in weights. Compared to pruning, quantization is much more hardware-friendly, and has become a "must-do" step for FPGA and ASIC implementations. This paper provides a definitive answer to the question for the first time. First, we build ADMM-NN-S by extending and enhancing ADMM-NN, a recently proposed joint weight pruning and quantization framework. Second, we develop a methodology for fair and fundamental comparison of non-structured and structured pruning in terms of both storage and computation efficiency. Our results show that ADMM-NN-S consistently outperforms the prior art: (i) it achieves 348x, 36x, and 8x overall weight pruning on LeNet-5, AlexNet, and ResNet-50, respectively, with (almost) zero accuracy loss; (ii) we demonstrate the first fully binarized (for all layers) DNNs can be lossless in accuracy in many cases. These results provide a strong baseline and credibility of our study. Based on the proposed comparison framework, with the same accuracy and quantization, the results show that non-structrued pruning is not competitive in terms of both storage and computation efficiency. Thus, we conclude that non-structured pruning is considered harmful. We urge the community not to continue the DNN inference acceleration for non-structured sparsity.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2019

Brain-inspired reverse adversarial examples

A human does not have to see all elephants to recognize an animal as an elephant. On contrast, current state-of-the-art deep learning approaches heavily depend on the variety of training samples and the capacity of the network. In practice, the size of network is always limited and it is impossible to access all the data samples. Under this circumstance, deep learning models are extremely fragile to human-imperceivable adversarial examples, which impose threats to all safety critical systems. Inspired by the association and attention mechanisms of the human brain, we propose reverse adversarial examples method that can greatly improve models' robustness on unseen data. Experiments show that our reverse adversarial method can improve accuracy on average 19.02% on ResNet18, MobileNet, and VGG16 on unseen data transformation. Besides, the proposed method is also applicable to compressed models and shows potential to compensate the robustness drop brought by model quantization - an absolute 30.78% accuracy improvement.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2019

SCAN: A Scalable Neural Networks Framework Towards Compact and Efficient Models

Remarkable achievements have been attained by deep neural networks in various applications. However, the increasing depth and width of such models also lead to explosive growth in both storage and computation, which has restricted the deployment of deep neural networks on resource-limited edge devices. To address this problem, we propose the so-called SCAN framework for networks training and inference, which is orthogonal and complementary to existing acceleration and compression methods. The proposed SCAN firstly divides neural networks into multiple sections according to their depth and constructs shallow classifiers upon the intermediate features of different sections. Moreover, attention modules and knowledge distillation are utilized to enhance the accuracy of shallow classifiers. Based on this architecture, we further propose a threshold controlled scalable inference mechanism to approach human-like sample-specific inference. Experimental results show that SCAN can be easily equipped on various neural networks without any adjustment on hyper-parameters or neural networks architectures, yielding significant performance gain on CIFAR100 and ImageNet. Codes will be released on github soon.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2019

Be Your Own Teacher: Improve the Performance of Convolutional Neural Networks via Self Distillation

Convolutional neural networks have been widely deployed in various application scenarios. In order to extend the applications' boundaries to some accuracy-crucial domains, researchers have been investigating approaches to boost accuracy through either deeper or wider network structures, which brings with them the exponential increment of the computational and storage cost, delaying the responding time. In this paper, we propose a general training framework named self distillation, which notably enhances the performance (accuracy) of convolutional neural networks through shrinking the size of the network rather than aggrandizing it. Different from traditional knowledge distillation - a knowledge transformation methodology among networks, which forces student neural networks to approximate the softmax layer outputs of pre-trained teacher neural networks, the proposed self distillation framework distills knowledge within network itself. The networks are firstly divided into several sections. Then the knowledge in the deeper portion of the networks is squeezed into the shallow ones. Experiments further prove the generalization of the proposed self distillation framework: enhancement of accuracy at average level is 2.65%, varying from 0.61% in ResNeXt as minimum to 4.07% in VGG19 as maximum. In addition, it can also provide flexibility of depth-wise scalable inference on resource-limited edge devices.Our codes will be released on github soon.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2019

Toward Extremely Low Bit and Lossless Accuracy in DNNs with Progressive ADMM

Weight quantization is one of the most important techniques of Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) model compression method. A recent work using systematic framework of DNN weight quantization with the advanced optimization algorithm ADMM (Alternating Direction Methods of Multipliers) achieves one of state-of-art results in weight quantization. In this work, we first extend such ADMM-based framework to guarantee solution feasibility and we have further developed a multi-step, progressive DNN weight quantization framework, with dual benefits of (i) achieving further weight quantization thanks to the special property of ADMM regularization, and (ii) reducing the search space within each step. Extensive experimental results demonstrate the superior performance compared with prior work. Some highlights: we derive the first lossless and fully binarized (for all layers) LeNet-5 for MNIST; And we derive the first fully binarized (for all layers) VGG-16 for CIFAR-10 and ResNet for ImageNet with reasonable accuracy loss.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2019

StructADMM: A Systematic, High-Efficiency Framework of Structured Weight Pruning for DNNs

Weight pruning methods of DNNs have been demonstrated to achieve a good model pruning rate without loss of accuracy, thereby alleviating the significant computation/storage requirements of large-scale DNNs. Structured weight pruning methods have been proposed to overcome the limitation of irregular network structure and demonstrated actual GPU acceleration. However, in prior work the pruning rate (degree of sparsity) and GPU acceleration are limited (to less than 50%) when accuracy needs to be maintained. In this work,we overcome these limitations by proposing a unified, systematic framework of structured weight pruning for DNNs. It is a framework that can be used to induce different types of structured sparsity, such as filter-wise, channel-wise, and shape-wise sparsity, as well non-structured sparsity. The proposed framework incorporates stochastic gradient descent with ADMM, and can be understood as a dynamic regularization method in which the regularization target is analytically updated in each iteration. Without loss of accuracy on the AlexNet model, we achieve 2.58X and 3.65X average measured speedup on two GPUs, clearly outperforming the prior work. The average speedups reach 3.15X and 8.52X when allowing a moderate ac-curacy loss of 2%. In this case the model compression for convolutional layers is 15.0X, corresponding to 11.93X measured CPU speedup. Our experiments on ResNet model and on other data sets like UCF101 and CIFAR-10 demonstrate the consistently higher performance of our framework.

cs.NE↗