Deep learning has achieved tremendous success by training increasingly large models, which are then compressed for practical deployment. We propose a drastically different approach to compact and optimal deep learning: We decouple the Degrees of freedom (DoF) and the actual number of parameters of a model, optimize a small DoF with predefined random linear constraints for a large model of arbitrary architecture, in one-stage end-to-end learning. Specifically, we create a recurrent parameter generator (RPG), which repeatedly fetches parameters from a ring and unpacks them onto a large model with random permutation and sign flipping to promote parameter decorrelation. We show that gradient descent can automatically find the best model under constraints with faster convergence. Our extensive experimentation reveals a log-linear relationship between model DoF and accuracy. Our RPG demonstrates remarkable DoF reduction and can be further pruned and quantized for additional run-time performance gain. For example, in terms of top-1 accuracy on ImageNet, RPG achieves $96\%$ of ResNet18's performance with only $18\%$ DoF (the equivalent of one convolutional layer) and $52\%$ of ResNet34's performance with only $0.25\%$ DoF! Our work shows a significant potential of constrained neural optimization in compact and optimal deep learning.
Recent image degradation estimation methods have enabled single-image super-resolution (SR) approaches to better upsample real-world images. Among these methods, explicit kernel estimation approaches have demonstrated unprecedented performance at handling unknown degradations. Nonetheless, a number of limitations constrain their efficacy when used by downstream SR models. Specifically, this family of methods yields i) excessive inference time due to long per-image adaptation times and ii) inferior image fidelity due to kernel mismatch. In this work, we introduce a learning-to-learn approach that meta-learns from the information contained in a distribution of images, thereby enabling significantly faster adaptation to new images with substantially improved performance in both kernel estimation and image fidelity. Specifically, we meta-train a kernel-generating GAN, named MetaKernelGAN, on a range of tasks, such that when a new image is presented, the generator starts from an informed kernel estimate and the discriminator starts with a strong capability to distinguish between patch distributions. Compared with state-of-the-art methods, our experiments show that MetaKernelGAN better estimates the magnitude and covariance of the kernel, leading to state-of-the-art blind SR results within a similar computational regime when combined with a non-blind SR model. Through supervised learning of an unsupervised learner, our method maintains the generalizability of the unsupervised learner, improves the optimization stability of kernel estimation, and hence image adaptation, and leads to a faster inference with a speedup between 14.24 to 102.1x over existing methods.
Line segments are ubiquitous in our human-made world and are increasingly used in vision tasks. They are complementary to feature points thanks to their spatial extent and the structural information they provide. Traditional line detectors based on the image gradient are extremely fast and accurate, but lack robustness in noisy images and challenging conditions. Their learned counterparts are more repeatable and can handle challenging images, but at the cost of a lower accuracy and a bias towards wireframe lines. We propose to combine traditional and learned approaches to get the best of both worlds: an accurate and robust line detector that can be trained in the wild without ground truth lines. Our new line segment detector, DeepLSD, processes images with a deep network to generate a line attraction field, before converting it to a surrogate image gradient magnitude and angle, which is then fed to any existing handcrafted line detector. Additionally, we propose a new optimization tool to refine line segments based on the attraction field and vanishing points. This refinement improves the accuracy of current deep detectors by a large margin. We demonstrate the performance of our method on low-level line detection metrics, as well as on several downstream tasks using multiple challenging datasets. The source code and models are available at //github.com/cvg/DeepLSD.
Methods for learning optimal policies use causal machine learning models to create human-interpretable rules for making choices around the allocation of different policy interventions. However, in realistic policy-making contexts, decision-makers often care about trade-offs between outcomes, not just singlemindedly maximising utility for one outcome. This paper proposes an approach termed Multi-Objective Policy Learning (MOPoL) which combines optimal decision trees for policy learning with a multi-objective Bayesian optimisation approach to explore the trade-off between multiple outcomes. It does this by building a Pareto frontier of non-dominated models for different hyperparameter settings. The key here is that a low-cost surrogate function can be an accurate proxy for the very computationally costly optimal tree in terms of expected regret. This surrogate can be fit many times with different hyperparameter values to proxy the performance of the optimal model. The method is applied to a real-world case-study of conditional cash transfers in Morocco where hybrid (partially optimal, partially greedy) policy trees provide good performance as a surrogate for optimal trees while being computationally cheap enough to feasibly fit a Pareto frontier.
Residual networks (ResNets) have displayed impressive results in pattern recognition and, recently, have garnered considerable theoretical interest due to a perceived link with neural ordinary differential equations (neural ODEs). This link relies on the convergence of network weights to a smooth function as the number of layers increases. We investigate the properties of weights trained by stochastic gradient descent and their scaling with network depth through detailed numerical experiments. We observe the existence of scaling regimes markedly different from those assumed in neural ODE literature. Depending on certain features of the network architecture, such as the smoothness of the activation function, one may obtain an alternative ODE limit, a stochastic differential equation or neither of these. These findings cast doubts on the validity of the neural ODE model as an adequate asymptotic description of deep ResNets and point to an alternative class of differential equations as a better description of the deep network limit.
The essence of multivariate sequential learning is all about how to extract dependencies in data. These data sets, such as hourly medical records in intensive care units and multi-frequency phonetic time series, often time exhibit not only strong serial dependencies in the individual components (the "marginal" memory) but also non-negligible memories in the cross-sectional dependencies (the "joint" memory). Because of the multivariate complexity in the evolution of the joint distribution that underlies the data generating process, we take a data-driven approach and construct a novel recurrent network architecture, termed Memory-Gated Recurrent Networks (mGRN), with gates explicitly regulating two distinct types of memories: the marginal memory and the joint memory. Through a combination of comprehensive simulation studies and empirical experiments on a range of public datasets, we show that our proposed mGRN architecture consistently outperforms state-of-the-art architectures targeting multivariate time series.
Deep Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) are a special type of Neural Networks, which have shown state-of-the-art results on various competitive benchmarks. The powerful learning ability of deep CNN is largely achieved with the use of multiple non-linear feature extraction stages that can automatically learn hierarchical representation from the data. Availability of a large amount of data and improvements in the hardware processing units have accelerated the research in CNNs and recently very interesting deep CNN architectures are reported. The recent race in deep CNN architectures for achieving high performance on the challenging benchmarks has shown that the innovative architectural ideas, as well as parameter optimization, can improve the CNN performance on various vision-related tasks. In this regard, different ideas in the CNN design have been explored such as use of different activation and loss functions, parameter optimization, regularization, and restructuring of processing units. However, the major improvement in representational capacity is achieved by the restructuring of the processing units. Especially, the idea of using a block as a structural unit instead of a layer is gaining substantial appreciation. This survey thus focuses on the intrinsic taxonomy present in the recently reported CNN architectures and consequently, classifies the recent innovations in CNN architectures into seven different categories. These seven categories are based on spatial exploitation, depth, multi-path, width, feature map exploitation, channel boosting and attention. Additionally, it covers the elementary understanding of the CNN components and sheds light on the current challenges and applications of CNNs.
We propose a new method for event extraction (EE) task based on an imitation learning framework, specifically, inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) via generative adversarial network (GAN). The GAN estimates proper rewards according to the difference between the actions committed by the expert (or ground truth) and the agent among complicated states in the environment. EE task benefits from these dynamic rewards because instances and labels yield to various extents of difficulty and the gains are expected to be diverse -- e.g., an ambiguous but correctly detected trigger or argument should receive high gains -- while the traditional RL models usually neglect such differences and pay equal attention on all instances. Moreover, our experiments also demonstrate that the proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art methods, without explicit feature engineering.
In this paper, we propose a novel multi-task learning architecture, which incorporates recent advances in attention mechanisms. Our approach, the Multi-Task Attention Network (MTAN), consists of a single shared network containing a global feature pool, together with task-specific soft-attention modules, which are trainable in an end-to-end manner. These attention modules allow for learning of task-specific features from the global pool, whilst simultaneously allowing for features to be shared across different tasks. The architecture can be built upon any feed-forward neural network, is simple to implement, and is parameter efficient. Experiments on the CityScapes dataset show that our method outperforms several baselines in both single-task and multi-task learning, and is also more robust to the various weighting schemes in the multi-task loss function. We further explore the effectiveness of our method through experiments over a range of task complexities, and show how our method scales well with task complexity compared to baselines.
Deep learning has yielded state-of-the-art performance on many natural language processing tasks including named entity recognition (NER). However, this typically requires large amounts of labeled data. In this work, we demonstrate that the amount of labeled training data can be drastically reduced when deep learning is combined with active learning. While active learning is sample-efficient, it can be computationally expensive since it requires iterative retraining. To speed this up, we introduce a lightweight architecture for NER, viz., the CNN-CNN-LSTM model consisting of convolutional character and word encoders and a long short term memory (LSTM) tag decoder. The model achieves nearly state-of-the-art performance on standard datasets for the task while being computationally much more efficient than best performing models. We carry out incremental active learning, during the training process, and are able to nearly match state-of-the-art performance with just 25\% of the original training data.
Image segmentation is considered to be one of the critical tasks in hyperspectral remote sensing image processing. Recently, convolutional neural network (CNN) has established itself as a powerful model in segmentation and classification by demonstrating excellent performances. The use of a graphical model such as a conditional random field (CRF) contributes further in capturing contextual information and thus improving the segmentation performance. In this paper, we propose a method to segment hyperspectral images by considering both spectral and spatial information via a combined framework consisting of CNN and CRF. We use multiple spectral cubes to learn deep features using CNN, and then formulate deep CRF with CNN-based unary and pairwise potential functions to effectively extract the semantic correlations between patches consisting of three-dimensional data cubes. Effective piecewise training is applied in order to avoid the computationally expensive iterative CRF inference. Furthermore, we introduce a deep deconvolution network that improves the segmentation masks. We also introduce a new dataset and experimented our proposed method on it along with several widely adopted benchmark datasets to evaluate the effectiveness of our method. By comparing our results with those from several state-of-the-art models, we show the promising potential of our method.