Turbulence simulation with classical numerical solvers requires very high-resolution grids to accurately resolve dynamics. Here we train learned simulators at low spatial and temporal resolutions to capture turbulent dynamics generated at high resolution. We show that our proposed model can simulate turbulent dynamics more accurately than classical numerical solvers at the same low resolutions across various scientifically relevant metrics. Our model is trained end-to-end from data and is capable of learning a range of challenging chaotic and turbulent dynamics at low resolution, including trajectories generated by the state-of-the-art Athena++ engine. We show that our simpler, general-purpose architecture outperforms various more specialized, turbulence-specific architectures from the learned turbulence simulation literature. In general, we see that learned simulators yield unstable trajectories; however, we show that tuning training noise and temporal downsampling solves this problem. We also find that while generalization beyond the training distribution is a challenge for learned models, training noise, convolutional architectures, and added loss constraints can help. Broadly, we conclude that our learned simulator outperforms traditional solvers run on coarser grids, and emphasize that simple design choices can offer stability and robust generalization.
Human action recognition and analysis have great demand and important application significance in video surveillance, video retrieval, and human-computer interaction. The task of human action quality evaluation requires the intelligent system to automatically and objectively evaluate the action completed by the human. The action quality assessment model can reduce the human and material resources spent in action evaluation and reduce subjectivity. In this paper, we provide a comprehensive survey of existing papers on video-based action quality assessment. Different from human action recognition, the application scenario of action quality assessment is relatively narrow. Most of the existing work focuses on sports and medical care. We first introduce the definition and challenges of human action quality assessment. Then we present the existing datasets and evaluation metrics. In addition, we summarized the methods of sports and medical care according to the model categories and publishing institutions according to the characteristics of the two fields. At the end, combined with recent work, the promising development direction in action quality assessment is discussed.
Vision Transformers (ViT) serve as powerful vision models. Unlike convolutional neural networks, which dominated vision research in previous years, vision transformers enjoy the ability to capture long-range dependencies in the data. Nonetheless, an integral part of any transformer architecture, the self-attention mechanism, suffers from high latency and inefficient memory utilization, making it less suitable for high-resolution input images. To alleviate these shortcomings, hierarchical vision models locally employ self-attention on non-interleaving windows. This relaxation reduces the complexity to be linear in the input size; however, it limits the cross-window interaction, hurting the model performance. In this paper, we propose a new shift-invariant local attention layer, called query and attend (QnA), that aggregates the input locally in an overlapping manner, much like convolutions. The key idea behind QnA is to introduce learned queries, which allow fast and efficient implementation. We verify the effectiveness of our layer by incorporating it into a hierarchical vision transformer model. We show improvements in speed and memory complexity while achieving comparable accuracy with state-of-the-art models. Finally, our layer scales especially well with window size, requiring up-to x10 less memory while being up-to x5 faster than existing methods. The code is publicly available at \url{//github.com/moabarar/qna}.
Atmospheric turbulence deteriorates the quality of images captured by long-range imaging systems by introducing blur and geometric distortions to the captured scene. This leads to a drastic drop in performance when computer vision algorithms like object/face recognition and detection are performed on these images. In recent years, various deep learning-based atmospheric turbulence mitigation methods have been proposed in the literature. These methods are often trained using synthetically generated images and tested on real-world images. Hence, the performance of these restoration methods depends on the type of simulation used for training the network. In this paper, we systematically evaluate the effectiveness of various turbulence simulation methods on image restoration. In particular, we evaluate the performance of two state-or-the-art restoration networks using six simulations method on a real-world LRFID dataset consisting of face images degraded by turbulence. This paper will provide guidance to the researchers and practitioners working in this field to choose the suitable data generation models for training deep models for turbulence mitigation. The implementation codes for the simulation methods, source codes for the networks, and the pre-trained models will be publicly made available.
Transformer models yield impressive results on many NLP and sequence modeling tasks. Remarkably, Transformers can handle long sequences which allows them to produce long coherent outputs: full paragraphs produced by GPT-3 or well-structured images produced by DALL-E. These large language models are impressive but also very inefficient and costly, which limits their applications and accessibility. We postulate that having an explicit hierarchical architecture is the key to Transformers that efficiently handle long sequences. To verify this claim, we first study different ways to downsample and upsample activations in Transformers so as to make them hierarchical. We use the best performing upsampling and downsampling layers to create Hourglass - a hierarchical Transformer language model. Hourglass improves upon the Transformer baseline given the same amount of computation and can yield the same results as Transformers more efficiently. In particular, Hourglass sets new state-of-the-art for Transformer models on the ImageNet32 generation task and improves language modeling efficiency on the widely studied enwik8 benchmark.
Controlled text generation tasks such as unsupervised text style transfer have increasingly adopted the use of Reinforcement Learning (RL). A major challenge in applying RL to such tasks is the sparse reward, which is available only after the full text is generated. Sparse rewards, combined with a large action space make RL training sample-inefficient and difficult to converge. Recently proposed reward-shaping strategies to address this issue have shown only negligible gains. In contrast, this work proposes a novel approach that provides dense rewards to each generated token. We evaluate our approach by its usage in unsupervised text style transfer. Averaged across datasets, our style transfer system improves upon current state-of-art systems by 21\% on human evaluation and 12\% on automatic evaluation. Upon ablated comparison with the current reward shaping approach (the `roll-out strategy'), using dense rewards improves the overall style transfer quality by 22\% based on human evaluation. Further the RL training is 2.5 times as sample efficient, and 7 times faster.
While neural architecture search (NAS) has enabled automated machine learning (AutoML) for well-researched areas, its application to tasks beyond computer vision is still under-explored. As less-studied domains are precisely those where we expect AutoML to have the greatest impact, in this work we study NAS for efficiently solving diverse problems. Seeking an approach that is fast, simple, and broadly applicable, we fix a standard convolutional network (CNN) topology and propose to search for the right kernel sizes and dilations its operations should take on. This dramatically expands the model's capacity to extract features at multiple resolutions for different types of data while only requiring search over the operation space. To overcome the efficiency challenges of naive weight-sharing in this search space, we introduce DASH, a differentiable NAS algorithm that computes the mixture-of-operations using the Fourier diagonalization of convolution, achieving both a better asymptotic complexity and an up-to-10x search time speedup in practice. We evaluate DASH on NAS-Bench-360, a suite of ten tasks designed for benchmarking NAS in diverse domains. DASH outperforms state-of-the-art methods in aggregate, attaining the best-known automated performance on seven tasks. Meanwhile, on six of the ten tasks, the combined search and retraining time is less than 2x slower than simply training a CNN backbone that is far less accurate.
Deep learning approaches have demonstrated success in modeling analog audio effects. Nevertheless, challenges remain in modeling more complex effects that involve time-varying nonlinear elements, such as dynamic range compressors. Existing neural network approaches for modeling compression either ignore the device parameters, do not attain sufficient accuracy, or otherwise require large noncausal models prohibiting real-time operation. In this work, we propose a modification to temporal convolutional networks (TCNs) enabling greater efficiency without sacrificing performance. By utilizing very sparse convolutional kernels through rapidly growing dilations, our model attains a significant receptive field using fewer layers, reducing computation. Through a detailed evaluation we demonstrate our efficient and causal approach achieves state-of-the-art performance in modeling the analog LA-2A, is capable of real-time operation on CPU, and only requires 10 minutes of training data.
With many real-world applications of Natural Language Processing (NLP) comprising of long texts, there has been a rise in NLP benchmarks that measure the accuracy of models that can handle longer input sequences. However, these benchmarks do not consider the trade-offs between accuracy, speed, and power consumption as input sizes or model sizes are varied. In this work, we perform a systematic study of this accuracy vs. efficiency trade-off on two widely used long-sequence models - Longformer-Encoder-Decoder (LED) and Big Bird - during fine-tuning and inference on four datasets from the SCROLLS benchmark. To study how this trade-off differs across hyperparameter settings, we compare the models across four sequence lengths (1024, 2048, 3072, 4096) and two model sizes (base and large) under a fixed resource budget. We find that LED consistently achieves better accuracy at lower energy costs than Big Bird. For summarization, we find that increasing model size is more energy efficient than increasing sequence length for higher accuracy. However, this comes at the cost of a large drop in inference speed. For question answering, we find that smaller models are both more efficient and more accurate due to the larger training batch sizes possible under a fixed resource budget.
Conventionally, spatiotemporal modeling network and its complexity are the two most concentrated research topics in video action recognition. Existing state-of-the-art methods have achieved excellent accuracy regardless of the complexity meanwhile efficient spatiotemporal modeling solutions are slightly inferior in performance. In this paper, we attempt to acquire both efficiency and effectiveness simultaneously. First of all, besides traditionally treating H x W x T video frames as space-time signal (viewing from the Height-Width spatial plane), we propose to also model video from the other two Height-Time and Width-Time planes, to capture the dynamics of video thoroughly. Secondly, our model is designed based on 2D CNN backbones and model complexity is well kept in mind by design. Specifically, we introduce a novel multi-view fusion (MVF) module to exploit video dynamics using separable convolution for efficiency. It is a plug-and-play module and can be inserted into off-the-shelf 2D CNNs to form a simple yet effective model called MVFNet. Moreover, MVFNet can be thought of as a generalized video modeling framework and it can specialize to be existing methods such as C2D, SlowOnly, and TSM under different settings. Extensive experiments are conducted on popular benchmarks (i.e., Something-Something V1 & V2, Kinetics, UCF-101, and HMDB-51) to show its superiority. The proposed MVFNet can achieve state-of-the-art performance with 2D CNN's complexity.
In this paper, we proposed to apply meta learning approach for low-resource automatic speech recognition (ASR). We formulated ASR for different languages as different tasks, and meta-learned the initialization parameters from many pretraining languages to achieve fast adaptation on unseen target language, via recently proposed model-agnostic meta learning algorithm (MAML). We evaluated the proposed approach using six languages as pretraining tasks and four languages as target tasks. Preliminary results showed that the proposed method, MetaASR, significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art multitask pretraining approach on all target languages with different combinations of pretraining languages. In addition, since MAML's model-agnostic property, this paper also opens new research direction of applying meta learning to more speech-related applications.