With the great success of Deep Neural Networks (DNN), the design of efficient hardware accelerators has triggered wide interest in the research community. Existing research explores two architectural strategies: sequential layer execution and layer-wise pipelining. While the former supports a wider range of models, the latter is favoured for its enhanced customization and efficiency. A challenge for the layer-wise pipelining architecture is its substantial demand for the on-chip memory for weights storage, impeding the deployment of large-scale networks on resource-constrained devices. This paper introduces AutoWS, a pioneering memory management methodology that exploits both on-chip and off-chip memory to optimize weight storage within a layer-wise pipelining architecture, taking advantage of its static schedule. Through a comprehensive investigation on both the hardware design and the Design Space Exploration, our methodology is fully automated and enables the deployment of large-scale DNN models on resource-constrained devices, which was not possible in existing works that target layer-wise pipelining architectures. AutoWS is open-source: //github.com/Yu-Zhewen/AutoWS
We present MobileVLM, a competent multimodal vision language model (MMVLM) targeted to run on mobile devices. It is an amalgamation of a myriad of architectural designs and techniques that are mobile-oriented, which comprises a set of language models at the scale of 1.4B and 2.7B parameters, trained from scratch, a multimodal vision model that is pre-trained in the CLIP fashion, cross-modality interaction via an efficient projector. We evaluate MobileVLM on several typical VLM benchmarks. Our models demonstrate on par performance compared with a few much larger models. More importantly, we measure the inference speed on both a Qualcomm Snapdragon 888 CPU and an NVIDIA Jeston Orin GPU, and we obtain state-of-the-art performance of 21.5 tokens and 65.3 tokens per second, respectively. Our code will be made available at: //github.com/Meituan-AutoML/MobileVLM.
In the realm of edge computing, the increasing demand for high Quality of Service (QoS), particularly in dynamic multimedia streaming applications (e.g., Augmented Reality/Virtual Reality and online gaming), has prompted the need for effective solutions. Nevertheless, adopting an edge paradigm grounded in distributed computing has exacerbated the issue of tail latency. Given a limited variety of multimedia services supported by edge servers and the dynamic nature of user requests, employing traditional queuing methods to model tail latency in distributed edge computing is challenging, substantially exacerbating head-of-line (HoL) blocking. In response to this challenge, we have developed a learning-based scheduling method to mitigate the overall tail latency, which adaptively selects appropriate edge servers for execution as incoming distributed tasks vary with unknown size. To optimize the utilization of the edge computing paradigm, we leverage Laplace transform techniques to theoretically derive an upper bound for the response time of edge servers. Subsequently, we integrate this upper bound into reinforcement learning to facilitate tail learning and enable informed decisions for autonomous distributed scheduling. The experiment results demonstrate the efficiency in reducing tail latency compared to existing methods.
Despite the current surge of interest in autonomous robotic systems, robot activity recognition within restricted indoor environments remains a formidable challenge. Conventional methods for detecting and recognizing robotic arms' activities often rely on vision-based or light detection and ranging (LiDAR) sensors, which require line-of-sight (LoS) access and may raise privacy concerns, for example, in nursing facilities. This research pioneers an innovative approach harnessing channel state information (CSI) measured from WiFi signals, subtly influenced by the activity of robotic arms. We developed an attention-based network to classify eight distinct activities performed by a Franka Emika robotic arm in different situations. Our proposed bidirectional vision transformer-concatenated (BiVTC) methodology aspires to predict robotic arm activities accurately, even when trained on activities with different velocities, all without dependency on external or internal sensors or visual aids. Considering the high dependency of CSI data to the environment, motivated us to study the problem of sniffer location selection, by systematically changing the sniffer's location and collecting different sets of data. Finally, this paper also marks the first publication of the CSI data of eight distinct robotic arm activities, collectively referred to as RoboFiSense. This initiative aims to provide a benchmark dataset and baselines to the research community, fostering advancements in the field of robotics sensing.
The increasing deployment of ML models on the critical path of production applications in both datacenter and the edge requires ML inference serving systems to serve these models under unpredictable and bursty request arrival rates. Serving models under such conditions requires these systems to strike a careful balance between the latency and accuracy requirements of the application and the overall efficiency of utilization of scarce resources. State-of-the-art systems resolve this tension by either choosing a static point in the latency-accuracy tradeoff space to serve all requests or load specific models on the critical path of request serving. In this work, we instead resolve this tension by simultaneously serving the entire-range of models spanning the latency-accuracy tradeoff space. Our novel mechanism, SubNetAct, achieves this by carefully inserting specialized operators in weight-shared SuperNetworks. These operators enable SubNetAct to dynamically route requests through the network to meet a latency and accuracy target. SubNetAct requires upto 2.6x lower memory to serve a vastly-higher number of models than prior state-of-the-art. In addition, SubNetAct's near-instantaneous actuation of models unlocks the design space of fine-grained, reactive scheduling policies. We explore the design of one such extremely effective policy, SlackFit and instantiate both SubNetAct and SlackFit in a real system, SuperServe. SuperServe achieves 4.67% higher accuracy for the same SLO attainment and 2.85x higher SLO attainment for the same accuracy on a trace derived from the real-world Microsoft Azure Functions workload and yields the best trade-offs on a wide range of extremely-bursty synthetic traces automatically.
Federated bilevel optimization (FBO) has shown great potential recently in machine learning and edge computing due to the emerging nested optimization structure in meta-learning, fine-tuning, hyperparameter tuning, etc. However, existing FBO algorithms often involve complicated computations and require multiple sub-loops per iteration, each of which contains a number of communication rounds. In this paper, we propose a simple and flexible FBO framework named SimFBO, which is easy to implement without sub-loops, and includes a generalized server-side aggregation and update for improving communication efficiency. We further propose System-level heterogeneity robust FBO (ShroFBO) as a variant of SimFBO with stronger resilience to heterogeneous local computation. We show that SimFBO and ShroFBO provably achieve a linear convergence speedup with partial client participation and client sampling without replacement, as well as improved sample and communication complexities. Experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed methods over existing FBO algorithms.
Contrastive learning (CL) has emerged as a promising technique for improving recommender systems, addressing the challenge of data sparsity by leveraging self-supervised signals from raw data. Integration of CL with graph convolutional network (GCN)-based collaborative filterings (CFs) has been explored in recommender systems. However, current CL-based recommendation models heavily rely on low-pass filters and graph augmentations. In this paper, we propose a novel CL method for recommender systems called the reaction-diffusion graph contrastive learning model (RDGCL). We design our own GCN for CF based on both the diffusion, i.e., low-pass filter, and the reaction, i.e., high-pass filter, equations. Our proposed CL-based training occurs between reaction and diffusion-based embeddings, so there is no need for graph augmentations. Experimental evaluation on 6 benchmark datasets demonstrates that our proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art CL-based recommendation models. By enhancing recommendation accuracy and diversity, our method brings an advancement in CL for recommender systems.
Supplying data augmentation to conversational question answering (CQA) can effectively improve model performance. However, there is less improvement from single-turn datasets in CQA due to the distribution gap between single-turn and multi-turn datasets. On the other hand, while numerous single-turn datasets are available, we have not utilized them effectively. To solve this problem, we propose a novel method to convert single-turn datasets to multi-turn datasets. The proposed method consists of three parts, namely, a QA pair Generator, a QA pair Reassembler, and a question Rewriter. Given a sample consisting of context and single-turn QA pairs, the Generator obtains candidate QA pairs and a knowledge graph based on the context. The Reassembler utilizes the knowledge graph to get sequential QA pairs, and the Rewriter rewrites questions from a conversational perspective to obtain a multi-turn dataset S2M. Our experiments show that our method can synthesize effective training resources for CQA. Notably, S2M ranks 1st place on the QuAC leaderboard at the time of submission (Aug 24th, 2022).
Diffusion models (DMs) have shown great potential for high-quality image synthesis. However, when it comes to producing images with complex scenes, how to properly describe both image global structures and object details remains a challenging task. In this paper, we present Frido, a Feature Pyramid Diffusion model performing a multi-scale coarse-to-fine denoising process for image synthesis. Our model decomposes an input image into scale-dependent vector quantized features, followed by a coarse-to-fine gating for producing image output. During the above multi-scale representation learning stage, additional input conditions like text, scene graph, or image layout can be further exploited. Thus, Frido can be also applied for conditional or cross-modality image synthesis. We conduct extensive experiments over various unconditioned and conditional image generation tasks, ranging from text-to-image synthesis, layout-to-image, scene-graph-to-image, to label-to-image. More specifically, we achieved state-of-the-art FID scores on five benchmarks, namely layout-to-image on COCO and OpenImages, scene-graph-to-image on COCO and Visual Genome, and label-to-image on COCO. Code is available at //github.com/davidhalladay/Frido.
Over the past few years, the rapid development of deep learning technologies for computer vision has greatly promoted the performance of medical image segmentation (MedISeg). However, the recent MedISeg publications usually focus on presentations of the major contributions (e.g., network architectures, training strategies, and loss functions) while unwittingly ignoring some marginal implementation details (also known as "tricks"), leading to a potential problem of the unfair experimental result comparisons. In this paper, we collect a series of MedISeg tricks for different model implementation phases (i.e., pre-training model, data pre-processing, data augmentation, model implementation, model inference, and result post-processing), and experimentally explore the effectiveness of these tricks on the consistent baseline models. Compared to paper-driven surveys that only blandly focus on the advantages and limitation analyses of segmentation models, our work provides a large number of solid experiments and is more technically operable. With the extensive experimental results on both the representative 2D and 3D medical image datasets, we explicitly clarify the effect of these tricks. Moreover, based on the surveyed tricks, we also open-sourced a strong MedISeg repository, where each of its components has the advantage of plug-and-play. We believe that this milestone work not only completes a comprehensive and complementary survey of the state-of-the-art MedISeg approaches, but also offers a practical guide for addressing the future medical image processing challenges including but not limited to small dataset learning, class imbalance learning, multi-modality learning, and domain adaptation. The code has been released at: //github.com/hust-linyi/MedISeg
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}.