The impact of device and circuit-level effects in mixed-signal Resistive Random Access Memory (RRAM) accelerators typically manifest as performance degradation of Deep Learning (DL) algorithms, but the degree of impact varies based on algorithmic features. These include network architecture, capacity, weight distribution, and the type of inter-layer connections. Techniques are continuously emerging to efficiently train sparse neural networks, which may have activation sparsity, quantization, and memristive noise. In this paper, we present an extended Design Space Exploration (DSE) methodology to quantify the benefits and limitations of dense and sparse mapping schemes for a variety of network architectures. While sparsity of connectivity promotes less power consumption and is often optimized for extracting localized features, its performance on tiled RRAM arrays may be more susceptible to noise due to under-parameterization, when compared to dense mapping schemes. Moreover, we present a case study quantifying and formalizing the trade-offs of typical non-idealities introduced into 1-Transistor-1-Resistor (1T1R) tiled memristive architectures and the size of modular crossbar tiles using the CIFAR-10 dataset.
Anomaly detection among a large number of processes arises in many applications ranging from dynamic spectrum access to cybersecurity. In such problems one can often obtain noisy observations aggregated from a chosen subset of processes that conforms to a tree structure. The distribution of these observations, based on which the presence of anomalies is detected, may be only partially known. This gives rise to the need for a search strategy designed to account for both the sample complexity and the detection accuracy, as well as cope with statistical models that are known only up to some missing parameters. In this work we propose a sequential search strategy using two variations of the Generalized Local Likelihood Ratio statistic. Our proposed Hierarchical Dynamic Search (HDS) strategy is shown to be order-optimal with respect to the size of the search space and asymptotically optimal with respect to the detection accuracy. An explicit upper bound on the error probability of HDS is established for the finite sample regime. Extensive experiments are conducted, demonstrating the performance gains of HDS over existing methods.
Neural Architecture Search (NAS) algorithms are intended to remove the burden of manual neural network design, and have shown to be capable of designing excellent models for a variety of well-known problems. However, these algorithms require a variety of design parameters in the form of user configuration or hard-coded decisions which limit the variety of networks that can be discovered. This means that NAS algorithms do not eliminate model design tuning, they instead merely shift the burden of where that tuning needs to be applied. In this paper, we present SpiderNet, a hybrid differentiable-evolutionary and hardware-aware algorithm that rapidly and efficiently produces state-of-the-art networks. More importantly, SpiderNet is a proof-of-concept of a minimally-configured NAS algorithm; the majority of design choices seen in other algorithms are incorporated into SpiderNet's dynamically-evolving search space, minimizing the number of user choices to just two: reduction cell count and initial channel count. SpiderNet produces models highly-competitive with the state-of-the-art, and outperforms random search in accuracy, runtime, memory size, and parameter count.
The hard thresholding technique plays a vital role in the development of algorithms for sparse signal recovery. By merging this technique and heavy-ball acceleration method which is a multi-step extension of the traditional gradient descent method, we propose the so-called heavy-ball-based hard thresholding (HBHT) and heavy-ball-based hard thresholding pursuit (HBHTP) algorithms for signal recovery. It turns out that the HBHT and HBHTP can successfully recover a $k$-sparse signal if the restricted isometry constant of the measurement matrix satisfies $\delta_{3k}<0.618 $ and $\delta_{3k}<0.577,$ respectively. The guaranteed success of HBHT and HBHTP is also shown under the conditions $\delta_{2k}<0.356$ and $\delta_{2k}<0.377,$ respectively. Moreover, the finite convergence and stability of the two algorithms are also established in this paper. Simulations on random problem instances are performed to compare the performance of the proposed algorithms and several existing ones. Empirical results indicate that the HBHTP performs very comparably to a few existing algorithms and it takes less average time to achieve the signal recovery than these existing methods.
Different from handcrafted features, deep neural networks can automatically learn task-specific features from data. Due to this data-driven nature, they have achieved remarkable success in various areas. However, manual design and selection of suitable network architectures are time-consuming and require substantial effort of human experts. To address this problem, researchers have proposed neural architecture search (NAS) algorithms which can automatically generate network architectures but suffer from heavy computational cost and instability if searching from scratch. In this paper, we propose a hybrid NAS framework for ultrasound (US) image classification and segmentation. The hybrid framework consists of a pre-trained backbone and several searched cells (i.e., network building blocks), which takes advantage of the strengths of both NAS and the expert knowledge from existing convolutional neural networks. Specifically, two effective and lightweight operations, a mixed depth-wise convolution operator and a squeeze-and-excitation block, are introduced into the candidate operations to enhance the variety and capacity of the searched cells. These two operations not only decrease model parameters but also boost network performance. Moreover, we propose a re-aggregation strategy for the searched cells, aiming to further improve the performance for different vision tasks. We tested our method on two large US image datasets, including a 9-class echinococcosis dataset containing 9566 images for classification and an ovary dataset containing 3204 images for segmentation. Ablation experiments and comparison with other handcrafted or automatically searched architectures demonstrate that our method can generate more powerful and lightweight models for the above US image classification and segmentation tasks.
As the next-generation wireless networks thrive, full-duplex and relaying techniques are combined to improve the network performance. Random linear network coding (RLNC) is another popular technique to enhance the efficiency and reliability in wireless communications. In this paper, in order to explore the potential of RLNC in full-duplex relay networks, we investigate two fundamental perfect RLNC schemes and theoretically analyze their completion delay performance. The first scheme is a straightforward application of conventional perfect RLNC studied in wireless broadcast, so it involves no additional process at the relay. Its performance serves as an upper bound among all perfect RLNC schemes. The other scheme allows sufficiently large buffer and unconstrained linear coding at the relay. It attains the optimal performance and serves as a lower bound among all RLNC schemes. For both schemes, closed-form formulae to characterize the expected completion delay at a single receiver as well as for the whole system are derived. Numerical results are also demonstrated to justify the theoretical characterizations, and compare the two new schemes with the existing one.
How to recover a probability measure with sparse support from particular moments? This problem has been the focus of research in theoretical computer science and neural computing. However, there is no polynomial-time algorithm for the recovery. The best algorithm for the recovery requires $O(2^{\text{poly}(1/\epsilon)})$ for $\epsilon$-accurate recovery. We propose the first poly-time recovery method from carefully designed moments that only requires $O(\log(1/\epsilon)/\epsilon^2)$ computations for an $\epsilon$-accurate recovery. This method relies on the recovery of a planted two-layer neural network with two-dimensional inputs, a finite width, and zero-one activation. For such networks, we establish the first global convergence of gradient descent and demonstrate its application in sparse measure recovery.
The best neural architecture for a given machine learning problem depends on many factors: not only the complexity and structure of the dataset, but also on resource constraints including latency, compute, energy consumption, etc. Neural architecture search (NAS) for tabular datasets is an important but under-explored problem. Previous NAS algorithms designed for image search spaces incorporate resource constraints directly into the reinforcement learning rewards. In this paper, we argue that search spaces for tabular NAS pose considerable challenges for these existing reward-shaping methods, and propose a new reinforcement learning (RL) controller to address these challenges. Motivated by rejection sampling, when we sample candidate architectures during a search, we immediately discard any architecture that violates our resource constraints. We use a Monte-Carlo-based correction to our RL policy gradient update to account for this extra filtering step. Results on several tabular datasets show TabNAS, the proposed approach, efficiently finds high-quality models that satisfy the given resource constraints.
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.
Music Structure Analysis (MSA) consists in segmenting a music piece in several distinct sections. We approach MSA within a compression framework, under the hypothesis that the structure is more easily revealed by a simplified representation of the original content of the song. More specifically, under the hypothesis that MSA is correlated with similarities occurring at the bar scale, this article introduces the use of linear and non-linear compression schemes on barwise audio signals. Compressed representations capture the most salient components of the different bars in the song and are then used to infer the song structure using a dynamic programming algorithm. This work explores both low-rank approximation models such as Principal Component Analysis or Nonnegative Matrix Factorization and "piece-specific" Auto-Encoding Neural Networks, with the objective to learn latent representations specific to a given song. Such approaches do not rely on supervision nor annotations, which are well-known to be tedious to collect and possibly ambiguous in MSA description. In our experiments, several unsupervised compression schemes achieve a level of performance comparable to that of state-of-the-art supervised methods (for 3s tolerance) on the RWC-Pop dataset, showcasing the importance of the barwise compression processing for MSA.
The time and effort involved in hand-designing deep neural networks is immense. This has prompted the development of Neural Architecture Search (NAS) techniques to automate this design. However, NAS algorithms tend to be slow and expensive; they need to train vast numbers of candidate networks to inform the search process. This could be alleviated if we could partially predict a network's trained accuracy from its initial state. In this work, we examine the overlap of activations between datapoints in untrained networks and motivate how this can give a measure which is usefully indicative of a network's trained performance. We incorporate this measure into a simple algorithm that allows us to search for powerful networks without any training in a matter of seconds on a single GPU, and verify its effectiveness on NAS-Bench-101, NAS-Bench-201, NATS-Bench, and Network Design Spaces. Our approach can be readily combined with more expensive search methods; we examine a simple adaptation of regularised evolutionary search. Code for reproducing our experiments is available at //github.com/BayesWatch/nas-without-training.