We focus on addressing the dense backward propagation issue for training efficiency of N:M fine-grained sparsity that preserves at most N out of M consecutive weights and achieves practical speedups supported by the N:M sparse tensor core. Therefore, we present a novel method of Bi-directional Masks (Bi-Mask) with its two central innovations in: 1) Separate sparse masks in the two directions of forward and backward propagation to obtain training acceleration. It disentangles the forward and backward weight sparsity and overcomes the very dense gradient computation. 2) An efficient weight row permutation method to maintain performance. It picks up the permutation candidate with the most eligible N:M weight blocks in the backward to minimize the gradient gap between traditional uni-directional masks and our bi-directional masks. Compared with existing uni-directional scenario that applies a transposable mask and enables backward acceleration, our Bi-Mask is experimentally demonstrated to be more superior in performance. Also, our Bi-Mask performs on par with or even better than methods that fail to achieve backward acceleration. Project of this paper is available at \url{//github.com/zyxxmu/Bi-Mask}.
In this paper, we propose Mixed and Masked AutoEncoder (MixMAE), a simple but efficient pretraining method that is applicable to various hierarchical Vision Transformers. Existing masked image modeling (MIM) methods for hierarchical Vision Transformers replace a random subset of input tokens with a special [MASK] symbol and aim at reconstructing original image tokens from the corrupted image. However, we find that using the [MASK] symbol greatly slows down the training and causes pretraining-finetuning inconsistency, due to the large masking ratio (e.g., 60% in SimMIM). On the other hand, MAE does not introduce [MASK] tokens at its encoder at all but is not applicable for hierarchical Vision Transformers. To solve the issue and accelerate the pretraining of hierarchical models, we replace the masked tokens of one image with visible tokens of another image, i.e., creating a mixed image. We then conduct dual reconstruction to reconstruct the two original images from the mixed input, which significantly improves efficiency. While MixMAE can be applied to various hierarchical Transformers, this paper explores using Swin Transformer with a large window size and scales up to huge model size (to reach 600M parameters). Empirical results demonstrate that MixMAE can learn high-quality visual representations efficiently. Notably, MixMAE with Swin-B/W14 achieves 85.1% top-1 accuracy on ImageNet-1K by pretraining for 600 epochs. Besides, its transfer performances on the other 6 datasets show that MixMAE has better FLOPs / performance tradeoff than previous popular MIM methods. Code is available at //github.com/Sense-X/MixMIM.
This article investigates the challenge of achieving functional tool-use grasping with high-DoF anthropomorphic hands, with the aim of enabling anthropomorphic hands to perform tasks that require human-like manipulation and tool-use. However, accomplishing human-like grasping in real robots present many challenges, including obtaining diverse functional grasps for a wide variety of objects, handling generalization ability for kinematically diverse robot hands and precisely completing object shapes from a single-view perception. To tackle these challenges, we propose a six-step grasp synthesis algorithm based on fine-grained contact modeling that generates physically plausible and human-like functional grasps for category-level objects with minimal human demonstrations. With the contact-based optimization and learned dense shape correspondence, the proposed algorithm is adaptable to various objects in same category and a board range of robot hand models. To further demonstrate the robustness of the framework, over 10K functional grasps are synthesized to train our neural network, named DexFG-Net, which generates diverse sets of human-like functional grasps based on the reconstructed object model produced by a shape completion module. The proposed framework is extensively validated in simulation and on a real robot platform. Simulation experiments demonstrate that our method outperforms baseline methods by a large margin in terms of grasp functionality and success rate. Real robot experiments show that our method achieved an overall success rate of 79\% and 68\% for tool-use grasp on 3-D printed and real test objects, respectively, using a 5-Finger Schunk Hand. The experimental results indicate a step towards human-like grasping with anthropomorphic hands.
Many real-world applications require the prediction of long sequence time-series, such as electricity consumption planning. Long sequence time-series forecasting (LSTF) demands a high prediction capacity of the model, which is the ability to capture precise long-range dependency coupling between output and input efficiently. Recent studies have shown the potential of Transformer to increase the prediction capacity. However, there are several severe issues with Transformer that prevent it from being directly applicable to LSTF, such as quadratic time complexity, high memory usage, and inherent limitation of the encoder-decoder architecture. To address these issues, we design an efficient transformer-based model for LSTF, named Informer, with three distinctive characteristics: (i) a $ProbSparse$ Self-attention mechanism, which achieves $O(L \log L)$ in time complexity and memory usage, and has comparable performance on sequences' dependency alignment. (ii) the self-attention distilling highlights dominating attention by halving cascading layer input, and efficiently handles extreme long input sequences. (iii) the generative style decoder, while conceptually simple, predicts the long time-series sequences at one forward operation rather than a step-by-step way, which drastically improves the inference speed of long-sequence predictions. Extensive experiments on four large-scale datasets demonstrate that Informer significantly outperforms existing methods and provides a new solution to the LSTF problem.
In order to overcome the expressive limitations of graph neural networks (GNNs), we propose the first method that exploits vector flows over graphs to develop globally consistent directional and asymmetric aggregation functions. We show that our directional graph networks (DGNs) generalize convolutional neural networks (CNNs) when applied on a grid. Whereas recent theoretical works focus on understanding local neighbourhoods, local structures and local isomorphism with no global information flow, our novel theoretical framework allows directional convolutional kernels in any graph. First, by defining a vector field in the graph, we develop a method of applying directional derivatives and smoothing by projecting node-specific messages into the field. Then we propose the use of the Laplacian eigenvectors as such vector field, and we show that the method generalizes CNNs on an n-dimensional grid, and is provably more discriminative than standard GNNs regarding the Weisfeiler-Lehman 1-WL test. Finally, we bring the power of CNN data augmentation to graphs by providing a means of doing reflection, rotation and distortion on the underlying directional field. We evaluate our method on different standard benchmarks and see a relative error reduction of 8\% on the CIFAR10 graph dataset and 11% to 32% on the molecular ZINC dataset. An important outcome of this work is that it enables to translate any physical or biological problems with intrinsic directional axes into a graph network formalism with an embedded directional field.
For deploying a deep learning model into production, it needs to be both accurate and compact to meet the latency and memory constraints. This usually results in a network that is deep (to ensure performance) and yet thin (to improve computational efficiency). In this paper, we propose an efficient method to train a deep thin network with a theoretic guarantee. Our method is motivated by model compression. It consists of three stages. In the first stage, we sufficiently widen the deep thin network and train it until convergence. In the second stage, we use this well-trained deep wide network to warm up (or initialize) the original deep thin network. This is achieved by letting the thin network imitate the immediate outputs of the wide network from layer to layer. In the last stage, we further fine tune this well initialized deep thin network. The theoretical guarantee is established by using mean field analysis, which shows the advantage of layerwise imitation over traditional training deep thin networks from scratch by backpropagation. We also conduct large-scale empirical experiments to validate our approach. By training with our method, ResNet50 can outperform ResNet101, and BERT_BASE can be comparable with BERT_LARGE, where both the latter models are trained via the standard training procedures as in the literature.
Since hardware resources are limited, the objective of training deep learning models is typically to maximize accuracy subject to the time and memory constraints of training and inference. We study the impact of model size in this setting, focusing on Transformer models for NLP tasks that are limited by compute: self-supervised pretraining and high-resource machine translation. We first show that even though smaller Transformer models execute faster per iteration, wider and deeper models converge in significantly fewer steps. Moreover, this acceleration in convergence typically outpaces the additional computational overhead of using larger models. Therefore, the most compute-efficient training strategy is to counterintuitively train extremely large models but stop after a small number of iterations. This leads to an apparent trade-off between the training efficiency of large Transformer models and the inference efficiency of small Transformer models. However, we show that large models are more robust to compression techniques such as quantization and pruning than small models. Consequently, one can get the best of both worlds: heavily compressed, large models achieve higher accuracy than lightly compressed, small models.
Graph convolution networks (GCN) are increasingly popular in many applications, yet remain notoriously hard to train over large graph datasets. They need to compute node representations recursively from their neighbors. Current GCN training algorithms suffer from either high computational costs that grow exponentially with the number of layers, or high memory usage for loading the entire graph and node embeddings. In this paper, we propose a novel efficient layer-wise training framework for GCN (L-GCN), that disentangles feature aggregation and feature transformation during training, hence greatly reducing time and memory complexities. We present theoretical analysis for L-GCN under the graph isomorphism framework, that L-GCN leads to as powerful GCNs as the more costly conventional training algorithm does, under mild conditions. We further propose L^2-GCN, which learns a controller for each layer that can automatically adjust the training epochs per layer in L-GCN. Experiments show that L-GCN is faster than state-of-the-arts by at least an order of magnitude, with a consistent of memory usage not dependent on dataset size, while maintaining comparable prediction performance. With the learned controller, L^2-GCN can further cut the training time in half. Our codes are available at //github.com/Shen-Lab/L2-GCN.
We propose to pre-train a unified language model for both autoencoding and partially autoregressive language modeling tasks using a novel training procedure, referred to as a pseudo-masked language model (PMLM). Given an input text with masked tokens, we rely on conventional masks to learn inter-relations between corrupted tokens and context via autoencoding, and pseudo masks to learn intra-relations between masked spans via partially autoregressive modeling. With well-designed position embeddings and self-attention masks, the context encodings are reused to avoid redundant computation. Moreover, conventional masks used for autoencoding provide global masking information, so that all the position embeddings are accessible in partially autoregressive language modeling. In addition, the two tasks pre-train a unified language model as a bidirectional encoder and a sequence-to-sequence decoder, respectively. Our experiments show that the unified language models pre-trained using PMLM achieve new state-of-the-art results on a wide range of natural language understanding and generation tasks across several widely used benchmarks.
Graph convolutional network (GCN) has been successfully applied to many graph-based applications; however, training a large-scale GCN remains challenging. Current SGD-based algorithms suffer from either a high computational cost that exponentially grows with number of GCN layers, or a large space requirement for keeping the entire graph and the embedding of each node in memory. In this paper, we propose Cluster-GCN, a novel GCN algorithm that is suitable for SGD-based training by exploiting the graph clustering structure. Cluster-GCN works as the following: at each step, it samples a block of nodes that associate with a dense subgraph identified by a graph clustering algorithm, and restricts the neighborhood search within this subgraph. This simple but effective strategy leads to significantly improved memory and computational efficiency while being able to achieve comparable test accuracy with previous algorithms. To test the scalability of our algorithm, we create a new Amazon2M data with 2 million nodes and 61 million edges which is more than 5 times larger than the previous largest publicly available dataset (Reddit). For training a 3-layer GCN on this data, Cluster-GCN is faster than the previous state-of-the-art VR-GCN (1523 seconds vs 1961 seconds) and using much less memory (2.2GB vs 11.2GB). Furthermore, for training 4 layer GCN on this data, our algorithm can finish in around 36 minutes while all the existing GCN training algorithms fail to train due to the out-of-memory issue. Furthermore, Cluster-GCN allows us to train much deeper GCN without much time and memory overhead, which leads to improved prediction accuracy---using a 5-layer Cluster-GCN, we achieve state-of-the-art test F1 score 99.36 on the PPI dataset, while the previous best result was 98.71 by [16]. Our codes are publicly available at //github.com/google-research/google-research/tree/master/cluster_gcn.
We introduce a new language representation model called BERT, which stands for Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers. Unlike recent language representation models, BERT is designed to pre-train deep bidirectional representations from unlabeled text by jointly conditioning on both left and right context in all layers. As a result, the pre-trained BERT model can be fine-tuned with just one additional output layer to create state-of-the-art models for a wide range of tasks, such as question answering and language inference, without substantial task-specific architecture modifications. BERT is conceptually simple and empirically powerful. It obtains new state-of-the-art results on eleven natural language processing tasks, including pushing the GLUE score to 80.5% (7.7% point absolute improvement), MultiNLI accuracy to 86.7% (4.6% absolute improvement), SQuAD v1.1 question answering Test F1 to 93.2 (1.5 point absolute improvement) and SQuAD v2.0 Test F1 to 83.1 (5.1 point absolute improvement).