Deep-learning-based techniques have been widely adopted for autonomous driving software stacks for mass production in recent years, focusing primarily on perception modules, with some work extending this method to prediction modules. However, the downstream planning and control modules are still designed with hefty handcrafted rules, dominated by optimization-based methods such as quadratic programming or model predictive control. This results in a performance bottleneck for autonomous driving systems in that corner cases simply cannot be solved by enumerating hand-crafted rules. We present a deep-learning-based approach that brings prediction, decision, and planning modules together with the attempt to overcome the rule-based methods' deficiency in real-world applications of autonomous driving, especially for urban scenes. The DNN model we proposed is solely trained with 10 hours of human driver data, and it supports all mass-production ADAS features available on the market to date. This method is deployed onto a Jiyue test car with no modification to its factory-ready sensor set and compute platform. the feasibility, usability, and commercial potential are demonstrated in this article.
Recent trends in deep learning (DL) imposed hardware accelerators as the most viable solution for several classes of high-performance computing (HPC) applications such as image classification, computer vision, and speech recognition. This survey summarizes and classifies the most recent advances in designing DL accelerators suitable to reach the performance requirements of HPC applications. In particular, it highlights the most advanced approaches to support deep learning accelerations including not only GPU and TPU-based accelerators but also design-specific hardware accelerators such as FPGA-based and ASIC-based accelerators, Neural Processing Units, open hardware RISC-V-based accelerators and co-processors. The survey also describes accelerators based on emerging memory technologies and computing paradigms, such as 3D-stacked Processor-In-Memory, non-volatile memories (mainly, Resistive RAM and Phase Change Memories) to implement in-memory computing, Neuromorphic Processing Units, and accelerators based on Multi-Chip Modules. Among emerging technologies, we also include some insights into quantum-based accelerators and photonics. To conclude, the survey classifies the most influential architectures and technologies proposed in the last years, with the purpose of offering the reader a comprehensive perspective in the rapidly evolving field of deep learning.
Neuro-symbolic approaches to artificial intelligence, which combine neural networks with classical symbolic techniques, are growing in prominence, necessitating formal approaches to reason about their correctness. We propose a novel modelling formalism called neuro-symbolic concurrent stochastic games (NS-CSGs), which comprise two probabilistic finite-state agents interacting in a shared continuous-state environment. Each agent observes the environment using a neural perception mechanism, which converts inputs such as images into symbolic percepts, and makes decisions symbolically. We focus on the class of NS-CSGs with Borel state spaces and prove the existence and measurability of the value function for zero-sum discounted cumulative rewards under piecewise-constant restrictions on the components of this class of models. To compute values and synthesise strategies, we present, for the first time, practical value iteration (VI) and policy iteration (PI) algorithms to solve this new subclass of continuous-state CSGs. These require a finite decomposition of the environment induced by the neural perception mechanisms of the agents and rely on finite abstract representations of value functions and strategies closed under VI or PI. First, we introduce a Borel measurable piecewise-constant (B-PWC) representation of value functions, extend minimax backups to this representation and propose a value iteration algorithm called B-PWC VI. Second, we introduce two novel representations for the value functions and strategies, constant-piecewise-linear (CON-PWL) and constant-piecewise-constant (CON-PWC) respectively, and propose Minimax-action-free PI by extending a recent PI method based on alternating player choices for finite state spaces to Borel state spaces, which does not require normal-form games to be solved.
Recent advances in machine learning (ML) have spotlighted the pressing need for computing architectures that bridge the gap between memory bandwidth and processing power. The advent of deep neural networks has pushed traditional Von Neumann architectures to their limits due to the high latency and energy consumption costs associated with data movement between the processor and memory for these workloads. One of the solutions to overcome this bottleneck is to perform computation within the main memory through processing-in-memory (PIM), thereby limiting data movement and the costs associated with it. However, DRAM-based PIM struggles to achieve high throughput and energy efficiency due to internal data movement bottlenecks and the need for frequent refresh operations. In this work, we introduce OPIMA, a PIM-based ML accelerator, architected within an optical main memory. OPIMA has been designed to leverage the inherent massive parallelism within main memory while performing high-speed, low-energy optical computation to accelerate ML models based on convolutional neural networks. We present a comprehensive analysis of OPIMA to guide design choices and operational mechanisms. Additionally, we evaluate the performance and energy consumption of OPIMA, comparing it with conventional electronic computing systems and emerging photonic PIM architectures. The experimental results show that OPIMA can achieve 2.98x higher throughput and 137x better energy efficiency than the best-known prior work.
Despite the recent progress in deep learning, most approaches still go for a silo-like solution, focusing on learning each task in isolation: training a separate neural network for each individual task. Many real-world problems, however, call for a multi-modal approach and, therefore, for multi-tasking models. Multi-task learning (MTL) aims to leverage useful information across tasks to improve the generalization capability of a model. This thesis is concerned with multi-task learning in the context of computer vision. First, we review existing approaches for MTL. Next, we propose several methods that tackle important aspects of multi-task learning. The proposed methods are evaluated on various benchmarks. The results show several advances in the state-of-the-art of multi-task learning. Finally, we discuss several possibilities for future work.
We present a large-scale study on unsupervised spatiotemporal representation learning from videos. With a unified perspective on four recent image-based frameworks, we study a simple objective that can easily generalize all these methods to space-time. Our objective encourages temporally-persistent features in the same video, and in spite of its simplicity, it works surprisingly well across: (i) different unsupervised frameworks, (ii) pre-training datasets, (iii) downstream datasets, and (iv) backbone architectures. We draw a series of intriguing observations from this study, e.g., we discover that encouraging long-spanned persistency can be effective even if the timespan is 60 seconds. In addition to state-of-the-art results in multiple benchmarks, we report a few promising cases in which unsupervised pre-training can outperform its supervised counterpart. Code is made available at //github.com/facebookresearch/SlowFast
Approaches based on deep neural networks have achieved striking performance when testing data and training data share similar distribution, but can significantly fail otherwise. Therefore, eliminating the impact of distribution shifts between training and testing data is crucial for building performance-promising deep models. Conventional methods assume either the known heterogeneity of training data (e.g. domain labels) or the approximately equal capacities of different domains. In this paper, we consider a more challenging case where neither of the above assumptions holds. We propose to address this problem by removing the dependencies between features via learning weights for training samples, which helps deep models get rid of spurious correlations and, in turn, concentrate more on the true connection between discriminative features and labels. Extensive experiments clearly demonstrate the effectiveness of our method on multiple distribution generalization benchmarks compared with state-of-the-art counterparts. Through extensive experiments on distribution generalization benchmarks including PACS, VLCS, MNIST-M, and NICO, we show the effectiveness of our method compared with state-of-the-art counterparts.
Recently, various auxiliary tasks have been proposed to accelerate representation learning and improve sample efficiency in deep reinforcement learning (RL). However, existing auxiliary tasks do not take the characteristics of RL problems into consideration and are unsupervised. By leveraging returns, the most important feedback signals in RL, we propose a novel auxiliary task that forces the learnt representations to discriminate state-action pairs with different returns. Our auxiliary loss is theoretically justified to learn representations that capture the structure of a new form of state-action abstraction, under which state-action pairs with similar return distributions are aggregated together. In low data regime, our algorithm outperforms strong baselines on complex tasks in Atari games and DeepMind Control suite, and achieves even better performance when combined with existing auxiliary tasks.
Rehearsal, seeking to remind the model by storing old knowledge in lifelong learning, is one of the most effective ways to mitigate catastrophic forgetting, i.e., biased forgetting of previous knowledge when moving to new tasks. However, the old tasks of the most previous rehearsal-based methods suffer from the unpredictable domain shift when training the new task. This is because these methods always ignore two significant factors. First, the Data Imbalance between the new task and old tasks that makes the domain of old tasks prone to shift. Second, the Task Isolation among all tasks will make the domain shift toward unpredictable directions; To address the unpredictable domain shift, in this paper, we propose Multi-Domain Multi-Task (MDMT) rehearsal to train the old tasks and new task parallelly and equally to break the isolation among tasks. Specifically, a two-level angular margin loss is proposed to encourage the intra-class/task compactness and inter-class/task discrepancy, which keeps the model from domain chaos. In addition, to further address domain shift of the old tasks, we propose an optional episodic distillation loss on the memory to anchor the knowledge for each old task. Experiments on benchmark datasets validate the proposed approach can effectively mitigate the unpredictable domain shift.
Benefit from the quick development of deep learning techniques, salient object detection has achieved remarkable progresses recently. However, there still exists following two major challenges that hinder its application in embedded devices, low resolution output and heavy model weight. To this end, this paper presents an accurate yet compact deep network for efficient salient object detection. More specifically, given a coarse saliency prediction in the deepest layer, we first employ residual learning to learn side-output residual features for saliency refinement, which can be achieved with very limited convolutional parameters while keep accuracy. Secondly, we further propose reverse attention to guide such side-output residual learning in a top-down manner. By erasing the current predicted salient regions from side-output features, the network can eventually explore the missing object parts and details which results in high resolution and accuracy. Experiments on six benchmark datasets demonstrate that the proposed approach compares favorably against state-of-the-art methods, and with advantages in terms of simplicity, efficiency (45 FPS) and model size (81 MB).
Learning with limited data is a key challenge for visual recognition. Few-shot learning methods address this challenge by learning an instance embedding function from seen classes and apply the function to instances from unseen classes with limited labels. This style of transfer learning is task-agnostic: the embedding function is not learned optimally discriminative with respect to the unseen classes, where discerning among them is the target task. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to adapt the embedding model to the target classification task, yielding embeddings that are task-specific and are discriminative. To this end, we employ a type of self-attention mechanism called Transformer to transform the embeddings from task-agnostic to task-specific by focusing on relating instances from the test instances to the training instances in both seen and unseen classes. Our approach also extends to both transductive and generalized few-shot classification, two important settings that have essential use cases. We verify the effectiveness of our model on two standard benchmark few-shot classification datasets --- MiniImageNet and CUB, where our approach demonstrates state-of-the-art empirical performance.