Title: Comparison between layer-to-layer network training and conventional network training using Deep Convolutional Neural Networks Abstract: Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) are widely used in various applications due to their effectiveness in extracting features from data. However, the performance of a CNN heavily depends on its architecture and training process. In this study, we propose a layer-to-layer training method and compare its performance with the conventional training method. In the layer-to-layer training approach, we treat a portion of the early layers as a student network and the later layers as a teacher network. During each training step, we incrementally train the student network to learn from the output of the teacher network, and vice versa. We evaluate this approach on VGG16, ResNext, and DenseNet networks without pre-trained ImageNet weights and a regular CNN model. Our experiments show that the layer-to-layer training method outperforms the conventional training method for both models. Specifically, we achieve higher accuracy on the test set for the VGG16, ResNext, and DeseNet networks and the CNN model using layer-to-layer training compared to the conventional training method. Overall, our study highlights the importance of layer-wise training in CNNs and suggests that layer-to-layer training can be a promising approach for improving the accuracy of CNNs.
The main objective of image segmentation is to divide an image into homogeneous regions for further analysis. This is a significant and crucial task in many applications such as medical imaging. Deep learning (DL) methods have been proposed and widely used for image segmentation. However, these methods usually require a large amount of manually segmented data as training data and suffer from poor interpretability (known as the black box problem). The classical Mumford-Shah (MS) model is effective for segmentation and provides a piece-wise smooth approximation of the original image. In this paper, we replace the hand-crafted regularity term in the MS model with a data adaptive generalized learnable regularity term and use a multi-grid framework to unroll the MS model and obtain a variational model-based segmentation network with better generalizability and interpretability. This approach allows for the incorporation of learnable prior information into the network structure design. Moreover, the multi-grid framework enables multi-scale feature extraction and offers a mathematical explanation for the effectiveness of the U-shaped network structure in producing good image segmentation results. Due to the proposed network originates from a variational model, it can also handle small training sizes. Our experiments on the REFUGE dataset, the White Blood Cell image dataset, and 3D thigh muscle magnetic resonance (MR) images demonstrate that even with smaller training datasets, our method yields better segmentation results compared to related state of the art segmentation methods.
In this study, we focus on learning Hamiltonian systems, which involves predicting the coordinate (q) and momentum (p) variables generated by a symplectic mapping. Based on Chen & Tao (2021), the symplectic mapping is represented by a generating function. To extend the prediction time period, we develop a new learning scheme by splitting the time series (q_i, p_i) into several partitions. We then train a large-step neural network (LSNN) to approximate the generating function between the first partition (i.e. the initial condition) and each one of the remaining partitions. This partition approach makes our LSNN effectively suppress the accumulative error when predicting the system evolution. Then we train the LSNN to learn the motions of the 2:3 resonant Kuiper belt objects for a long time period of 25000 yr. The results show that there are two significant improvements over the neural network constructed in our previous work (Li et al. 2022): (1) the conservation of the Jacobi integral, and (2) the highly accurate predictions of the orbital evolution. Overall, we propose that the designed LSNN has the potential to considerably improve predictions of the long-term evolution of more general Hamiltonian systems.
The rapid advances in Vision Transformer (ViT) refresh the state-of-the-art performances in various vision tasks, overshadowing the conventional CNN-based models. This ignites a few recent striking-back research in the CNN world showing that pure CNN models can achieve as good performance as ViT models when carefully tuned. While encouraging, designing such high-performance CNN models is challenging, requiring non-trivial prior knowledge of network design. To this end, a novel framework termed Mathematical Architecture Design for Deep CNN (DeepMAD) is proposed to design high-performance CNN models in a principled way. In DeepMAD, a CNN network is modeled as an information processing system whose expressiveness and effectiveness can be analytically formulated by their structural parameters. Then a constrained mathematical programming (MP) problem is proposed to optimize these structural parameters. The MP problem can be easily solved by off-the-shelf MP solvers on CPUs with a small memory footprint. In addition, DeepMAD is a pure mathematical framework: no GPU or training data is required during network design. The superiority of DeepMAD is validated on multiple large-scale computer vision benchmark datasets. Notably on ImageNet-1k, only using conventional convolutional layers, DeepMAD achieves 0.7% and 1.5% higher top-1 accuracy than ConvNeXt and Swin on Tiny level, and 0.8% and 0.9% higher on Small level.
Graph neural networks (GNNs) are a type of deep learning models that learning over graphs, and have been successfully applied in many domains. Despite the effectiveness of GNNs, it is still challenging for GNNs to efficiently scale to large graphs. As a remedy, distributed computing becomes a promising solution of training large-scale GNNs, since it is able to provide abundant computing resources. However, the dependency of graph structure increases the difficulty of achieving high-efficiency distributed GNN training, which suffers from the massive communication and workload imbalance. In recent years, many efforts have been made on distributed GNN training, and an array of training algorithms and systems have been proposed. Yet, there is a lack of systematic review on the optimization techniques from graph processing to distributed execution. In this survey, we analyze three major challenges in distributed GNN training that are massive feature communication, the loss of model accuracy and workload imbalance. Then we introduce a new taxonomy for the optimization techniques in distributed GNN training that address the above challenges. The new taxonomy classifies existing techniques into four categories that are GNN data partition, GNN batch generation, GNN execution model, and GNN communication protocol.We carefully discuss the techniques in each category. In the end, we summarize existing distributed GNN systems for multi-GPUs, GPU-clusters and CPU-clusters, respectively, and give a discussion about the future direction on scalable GNNs.
Deep graph neural networks (GNNs) have achieved excellent results on various tasks on increasingly large graph datasets with millions of nodes and edges. However, memory complexity has become a major obstacle when training deep GNNs for practical applications due to the immense number of nodes, edges, and intermediate activations. To improve the scalability of GNNs, prior works propose smart graph sampling or partitioning strategies to train GNNs with a smaller set of nodes or sub-graphs. In this work, we study reversible connections, group convolutions, weight tying, and equilibrium models to advance the memory and parameter efficiency of GNNs. We find that reversible connections in combination with deep network architectures enable the training of overparameterized GNNs that significantly outperform existing methods on multiple datasets. Our models RevGNN-Deep (1001 layers with 80 channels each) and RevGNN-Wide (448 layers with 224 channels each) were both trained on a single commodity GPU and achieve an ROC-AUC of $87.74 \pm 0.13$ and $88.14 \pm 0.15$ on the ogbn-proteins dataset. To the best of our knowledge, RevGNN-Deep is the deepest GNN in the literature by one order of magnitude. Please visit our project website //www.deepgcns.org/arch/gnn1000 for more information.
Recently, a considerable literature has grown up around the theme of Graph Convolutional Network (GCN). How to effectively leverage the rich structural information in complex graphs, such as knowledge graphs with heterogeneous types of entities and relations, is a primary open challenge in the field. Most GCN methods are either restricted to graphs with a homogeneous type of edges (e.g., citation links only), or focusing on representation learning for nodes only instead of jointly propagating and updating the embeddings of both nodes and edges for target-driven objectives. This paper addresses these limitations by proposing a novel framework, namely the Knowledge Embedding based Graph Convolutional Network (KE-GCN), which combines the power of GCNs in graph-based belief propagation and the strengths of advanced knowledge embedding (a.k.a. knowledge graph embedding) methods, and goes beyond. Our theoretical analysis shows that KE-GCN offers an elegant unification of several well-known GCN methods as specific cases, with a new perspective of graph convolution. Experimental results on benchmark datasets show the advantageous performance of KE-GCN over strong baseline methods in the tasks of knowledge graph alignment and entity classification.
Normalization is known to help the optimization of deep neural networks. Curiously, different architectures require specialized normalization methods. In this paper, we study what normalization is effective for Graph Neural Networks (GNNs). First, we adapt and evaluate the existing methods from other domains to GNNs. Faster convergence is achieved with InstanceNorm compared to BatchNorm and LayerNorm. We provide an explanation by showing that InstanceNorm serves as a preconditioner for GNNs, but such preconditioning effect is weaker with BatchNorm due to the heavy batch noise in graph datasets. Second, we show that the shift operation in InstanceNorm results in an expressiveness degradation of GNNs for highly regular graphs. We address this issue by proposing GraphNorm with a learnable shift. Empirically, GNNs with GraphNorm converge faster compared to GNNs using other normalization. GraphNorm also improves the generalization of GNNs, achieving better performance on graph classification benchmarks.
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.
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.
Nowadays, the Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) have achieved impressive performance on many computer vision related tasks, such as object detection, image recognition, image retrieval, etc. These achievements benefit from the CNNs outstanding capability to learn the input features with deep layers of neuron structures and iterative training process. However, these learned features are hard to identify and interpret from a human vision perspective, causing a lack of understanding of the CNNs internal working mechanism. To improve the CNN interpretability, the CNN visualization is well utilized as a qualitative analysis method, which translates the internal features into visually perceptible patterns. And many CNN visualization works have been proposed in the literature to interpret the CNN in perspectives of network structure, operation, and semantic concept. In this paper, we expect to provide a comprehensive survey of several representative CNN visualization methods, including Activation Maximization, Network Inversion, Deconvolutional Neural Networks (DeconvNet), and Network Dissection based visualization. These methods are presented in terms of motivations, algorithms, and experiment results. Based on these visualization methods, we also discuss their practical applications to demonstrate the significance of the CNN interpretability in areas of network design, optimization, security enhancement, etc.