The field of neuromorphic computing is rapidly evolving. As both biological accuracy and practical implementations are explored, existing architectures are modified and improved for both purposes. The Temporal Neural Network(TNN) style of architecture is a good basis for approximating biological neurons due to its use of timed pulses to encode data and a voltage-threshold-like system. Using the Temporal Neural Network cortical column C3S architecture design as a basis, this project seeks to augment the network's design. This project takes note of two ideas and presents their designs with the goal of improving existing cortical column architecture. One need in this field is for an encoder that could convert between common digital formats and timed neuronal spikes, as biologically accurate networks are temporal in nature. To this end, this project presents an encoder to translate between binary encoded values and timed spikes to be processed by the neural network. Another need is for the reduction of wasted processing time to idleness, caused by lengthy Gamma cycle processing bursts. To this end, this project presents a relaxation of Gamma cycles to allow for them to end arbitrarily early once the network has determined an output response. With the goal of contributing to the betterment of the field of neuromorphic computer architecture, designs for both a binary-to-spike encoder, as well as a Gamma cycle controller, are presented and evaluated for optimal design parameters, with overall system gain and performance.
In high-performance computing (HPC), the demand for efficient parallel programming models has grown dramatically since the end of Dennard Scaling and the subsequent move to multi-core CPUs. OpenMP stands out as a popular choice due to its simplicity and portability, offering a directive-driven approach for shared-memory parallel programming. Despite its wide adoption, however, there is a lack of comprehensive data on the actual usage of OpenMP constructs, hindering unbiased insights into its popularity and evolution. This paper presents a statistical analysis of OpenMP usage and adoption trends based on a novel and extensive database, HPCORPUS, compiled from GitHub repositories containing C, C++, and Fortran code. The results reveal that OpenMP is the dominant parallel programming model, accounting for 45% of all analyzed parallel APIs. Furthermore, it has demonstrated steady and continuous growth in popularity over the past decade. Analyzing specific OpenMP constructs, the study provides in-depth insights into their usage patterns and preferences across the three languages. Notably, we found that while OpenMP has a strong "common core" of constructs in common usage (while the rest of the API is less used), there are new adoption trends as well, such as simd and target directives for accelerated computing and task for irregular parallelism. Overall, this study sheds light on OpenMP's significance in HPC applications and provides valuable data for researchers and practitioners. It showcases OpenMP's versatility, evolving adoption, and relevance in contemporary parallel programming, underlining its continued role in HPC applications and beyond. These statistical insights are essential for making informed decisions about parallelization strategies and provide a foundation for further advancements in parallel programming models and techniques.
Diffusion probabilistic models (DPMs) are a powerful class of generative models known for their ability to generate high-fidelity image samples. A major challenge in the implementation of DPMs is the slow sampling process. In this work, we bring a high-efficiency sampler for DPMs. Specifically, we propose a score-based exact solution paradigm for the diffusion ODEs corresponding to the sampling process of DPMs, which introduces a new perspective on developing numerical algorithms for solving diffusion ODEs. To achieve an efficient sampler, we propose a recursive derivative estimation (RDE) method to reduce the estimation error. With our proposed solution paradigm and RDE method, we propose the score-integrand solver with the convergence order guarantee as efficient solver (SciRE-Solver) for solving diffusion ODEs. The SciRE-Solver attains state-of-the-art (SOTA) sampling performance with a limited number of score function evaluations (NFE) on both discrete-time and continuous-time DPMs in comparison to existing training-free sampling algorithms. Such as, we achieve $3.48$ FID with $12$ NFE and $2.42$ FID with $20$ NFE for continuous-time DPMs on CIFAR10, respectively. Different from other samplers, SciRE-Solver has the promising potential to surpass the FIDs achieved in the original papers of some pre-trained models with a small NFEs. For example, we reach SOTA value of $2.40$ FID with $100$ NFE for continuous-time DPM and of $3.15$ FID with $84$ NFE for discrete-time DPM on CIFAR-10, as well as of $2.17$ ($2.02$) FID with $18$ ($50$) NFE for discrete-time DPM on CelebA 64$\times$64.
The integration of different modalities, such as audio and visual information, plays a crucial role in human perception of the surrounding environment. Recent research has made significant progress in designing fusion modules for audio-visual speech separation. However, they predominantly focus on multi-modal fusion architectures situated either at the top or bottom positions, rather than comprehensively considering multi-modal fusion at various hierarchical positions within the network. In this paper, we propose a novel model called self- and cross-attention network (SCANet), which leverages the attention mechanism for efficient audio-visual feature fusion. SCANet consists of two types of attention blocks: self-attention (SA) and cross-attention (CA) blocks, where the CA blocks are distributed at the top (TCA), middle (MCA) and bottom (BCA) of SCANet. These blocks maintain the ability to learn modality-specific features and enable the extraction of different semantics from audio-visual features. Comprehensive experiments on three standard audio-visual separation benchmarks (LRS2, LRS3, and VoxCeleb2) demonstrate the effectiveness of SCANet, outperforming existing state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods while maintaining comparable inference time.
Nowadays, deep learning based methods have demonstrated impressive performance on ideal super-resolution (SR) datasets, but most of these methods incur dramatically performance drops when directly applied in real-world SR reconstruction tasks with unpredictable blur kernels. To tackle this issue, blind SR methods are proposed to improve the visual results on random blur kernels, which causes unsatisfactory reconstruction effects on ideal low-resolution images similarly. In this paper, we propose a double-win framework for ideal and blind SR task, named S2R, including a light-weight transformer-based SR model (S2R transformer) and a novel coarse-to-fine training strategy, which can achieve excellent visual results on both ideal and random fuzzy conditions. On algorithm level, S2R transformer smartly combines some efficient and light-weight blocks to enhance the representation ability of extracted features with relatively low number of parameters. For training strategy, a coarse-level learning process is firstly performed to improve the generalization of the network with the help of a large-scale external dataset, and then, a fast fine-tune process is developed to transfer the pre-trained model to real-world SR tasks by mining the internal features of the image. Experimental results show that the proposed S2R outperforms other single-image SR models in ideal SR condition with only 578K parameters. Meanwhile, it can achieve better visual results than regular blind SR models in blind fuzzy conditions with only 10 gradient updates, which improve convergence speed by 300 times, significantly accelerating the transfer-learning process in real-world situations.
Intelligent driving systems can be used to mitigate congestion through simple actions, thus improving many socioeconomic factors such as commute time and gas costs. However, these systems assume precise control over autonomous vehicle fleets, and are hence limited in practice as they fail to account for uncertainty in human behavior. Piecewise Constant (PC) Policies address these issues by structurally modeling the likeness of human driving to reduce traffic congestion in dense scenarios to provide action advice to be followed by human drivers. However, PC policies assume that all drivers behave similarly. To this end, we develop a co-operative advisory system based on PC policies with a novel driver trait conditioned Personalized Residual Policy, PeRP. PeRP advises drivers to behave in ways that mitigate traffic congestion. We first infer the driver's intrinsic traits on how they follow instructions in an unsupervised manner with a variational autoencoder. Then, a policy conditioned on the inferred trait adapts the action of the PC policy to provide the driver with a personalized recommendation. Our system is trained in simulation with novel driver modeling of instruction adherence. We show that our approach successfully mitigates congestion while adapting to different driver behaviors, with 4 to 22% improvement in average speed over baselines.
The incredible development of federated learning (FL) has benefited various tasks in the domains of computer vision and natural language processing, and the existing frameworks such as TFF and FATE has made the deployment easy in real-world applications. However, federated graph learning (FGL), even though graph data are prevalent, has not been well supported due to its unique characteristics and requirements. The lack of FGL-related framework increases the efforts for accomplishing reproducible research and deploying in real-world applications. Motivated by such strong demand, in this paper, we first discuss the challenges in creating an easy-to-use FGL package and accordingly present our implemented package FederatedScope-GNN (FS-G), which provides (1) a unified view for modularizing and expressing FGL algorithms; (2) comprehensive DataZoo and ModelZoo for out-of-the-box FGL capability; (3) an efficient model auto-tuning component; and (4) off-the-shelf privacy attack and defense abilities. We validate the effectiveness of FS-G by conducting extensive experiments, which simultaneously gains many valuable insights about FGL for the community. Moreover, we employ FS-G to serve the FGL application in real-world E-commerce scenarios, where the attained improvements indicate great potential business benefits. We publicly release FS-G, as submodules of FederatedScope, at //github.com/alibaba/FederatedScope to promote FGL's research and enable broad applications that would otherwise be infeasible due to the lack of a dedicated package.
Following unprecedented success on the natural language tasks, Transformers have been successfully applied to several computer vision problems, achieving state-of-the-art results and prompting researchers to reconsider the supremacy of convolutional neural networks (CNNs) as {de facto} operators. Capitalizing on these advances in computer vision, the medical imaging field has also witnessed growing interest for Transformers that can capture global context compared to CNNs with local receptive fields. Inspired from this transition, in this survey, we attempt to provide a comprehensive review of the applications of Transformers in medical imaging covering various aspects, ranging from recently proposed architectural designs to unsolved issues. Specifically, we survey the use of Transformers in medical image segmentation, detection, classification, reconstruction, synthesis, registration, clinical report generation, and other tasks. In particular, for each of these applications, we develop taxonomy, identify application-specific challenges as well as provide insights to solve them, and highlight recent trends. Further, we provide a critical discussion of the field's current state as a whole, including the identification of key challenges, open problems, and outlining promising future directions. We hope this survey will ignite further interest in the community and provide researchers with an up-to-date reference regarding applications of Transformer models in medical imaging. Finally, to cope with the rapid development in this field, we intend to regularly update the relevant latest papers and their open-source implementations at \url{//github.com/fahadshamshad/awesome-transformers-in-medical-imaging}.
With the advances of data-driven machine learning research, a wide variety of prediction problems have been tackled. It has become critical to explore how machine learning and specifically deep learning methods can be exploited to analyse healthcare data. A major limitation of existing methods has been the focus on grid-like data; however, the structure of physiological recordings are often irregular and unordered which makes it difficult to conceptualise them as a matrix. As such, graph neural networks have attracted significant attention by exploiting implicit information that resides in a biological system, with interactive nodes connected by edges whose weights can be either temporal associations or anatomical junctions. In this survey, we thoroughly review the different types of graph architectures and their applications in healthcare. We provide an overview of these methods in a systematic manner, organized by their domain of application including functional connectivity, anatomical structure and electrical-based analysis. We also outline the limitations of existing techniques and discuss potential directions for future research.
With the rise and development of deep learning, computer vision has been tremendously transformed and reshaped. As an important research area in computer vision, scene text detection and recognition has been inescapably influenced by this wave of revolution, consequentially entering the era of deep learning. In recent years, the community has witnessed substantial advancements in mindset, approach and performance. This survey is aimed at summarizing and analyzing the major changes and significant progresses of scene text detection and recognition in the deep learning era. Through this article, we devote to: (1) introduce new insights and ideas; (2) highlight recent techniques and benchmarks; (3) look ahead into future trends. Specifically, we will emphasize the dramatic differences brought by deep learning and the grand challenges still remained. We expect that this review paper would serve as a reference book for researchers in this field. Related resources are also collected and compiled in our Github repository: //github.com/Jyouhou/SceneTextPapers.
Most existing works in visual question answering (VQA) are dedicated to improving the accuracy of predicted answers, while disregarding the explanations. We argue that the explanation for an answer is of the same or even more importance compared with the answer itself, since it makes the question and answering process more understandable and traceable. To this end, we propose a new task of VQA-E (VQA with Explanation), where the computational models are required to generate an explanation with the predicted answer. We first construct a new dataset, and then frame the VQA-E problem in a multi-task learning architecture. Our VQA-E dataset is automatically derived from the VQA v2 dataset by intelligently exploiting the available captions. We have conducted a user study to validate the quality of explanations synthesized by our method. We quantitatively show that the additional supervision from explanations can not only produce insightful textual sentences to justify the answers, but also improve the performance of answer prediction. Our model outperforms the state-of-the-art methods by a clear margin on the VQA v2 dataset.