Efficient detectors for edge devices are often optimized for metrics like parameters or speed counts, which remain weak correlation with the energy of detectors. However, among vision applications of convolutional neural networks (CNNs), some, such as always-on surveillance cameras, are critical for energy constraints. This paper aims to serve as a baseline by designing detectors to reach tradeoffs between energy and performance from two perspectives: 1) We extensively analyze various CNNs to identify low-energy architectures, including the selection of activation functions, convolutions operators, and feature fusion structures on necks. These underappreciated details in past works seriously affect the energy consumption of detectors; 2) To break through the dilemmatic energy-performance problem, we propose a balanced detector driven by energy using discovered low-energy components named \textit{FemtoDet}. In addition to the novel construction, we further improve FemtoDet by considering convolutions and training strategy optimizations. Specifically, we develop a new instance boundary enhancement (IBE) module for convolution optimization to overcome the contradiction between the limited capacity of CNNs and detection tasks in diverse spatial representations, and propose a recursive warm-restart (RecWR) for optimizing training strategy to escape the sub-optimization of light-weight detectors, considering the data shift produced in popular augmentations. As a result, FemtoDet with only 68.77k parameters achieves a competitive score of 46.3 AP50 on PASCAL VOC and power of 7.83W on RTX 3090. Extensive experiments on COCO and TJU-DHD datasets indicate that the proposed method achieves competitive results in diverse scenes.
Even nowadays, where Deep Learning (DL) has achieved state-of-the-art performance in a wide range of research domains, accelerating training and building robust DL models remains a challenging task. To this end, generations of researchers have pursued to develop robust methods for training DL architectures that can be less sensitive to weight distributions, model architectures and loss landscapes. However, such methods are limited to adaptive learning rate optimizers, initialization schemes, and clipping gradients without investigating the fundamental rule of parameters update. Although multiplicative updates have contributed significantly to the early development of machine learning and hold strong theoretical claims, to best of our knowledge, this is the first work that investigate them in context of DL training acceleration and robustness. In this work, we propose an optimization framework that fits to a wide range of optimization algorithms and enables one to apply alternative update rules. To this end, we propose a novel multiplicative update rule and we extend their capabilities by combining it with a traditional additive update term, under a novel hybrid update method. We claim that the proposed framework accelerates training, while leading to more robust models in contrast to traditionally used additive update rule and we experimentally demonstrate their effectiveness in a wide range of task and optimization methods. Such tasks ranging from convex and non-convex optimization to difficult image classification benchmarks applying a wide range of traditionally used optimization methods and Deep Neural Network (DNN) architectures.
Network slicing is one of the major catalysts to turn future telecommunication networks into versatile service platforms. Along with its benefits, network slicing is introducing new challenges in the development of sustainable network operations. In fact, guaranteeing slices requirements comes at the cost of additional energy consumption, in comparison to non-sliced networks. Yet, one of the main goals of operators is to offer the diverse 5G and beyond services, while ensuring energy efficiency. To this end, we study the problem of slice activation/deactivation, with the objective of minimizing energy consumption and maximizing the users quality of service (QoS). To solve the problem, we rely on two Multi-Armed Bandit (MAB) agents to derive decisions at individual base stations. Our evaluations are conducted using a real-world traffic dataset collected over an operational network in a medium size French city. Numerical results reveal that our proposed solutions provide approximately 11-14\% energy efficiency improvement compared to a configuration where all the slice instances are active, while maintaining the same level of QoS. Moreover, our work explicitly shows the impact of prioritizing the energy over QoS, and vice versa.
Lane detection plays a pivotal role in the field of autonomous vehicles and advanced driving assistant systems (ADAS). Over the years, numerous algorithms have emerged, spanning from rudimentary image processing techniques to sophisticated deep neural networks. The performance of deep learning-based models is highly dependent on the quality of their training data. Consequently, these models often experience a decline in performance when confronted with challenging scenarios such as extreme lighting conditions, partially visible lane markings, and sparse lane markings like Botts' dots. To address this, we present an end-to-end lane detection and classification system based on deep learning methodologies. In our study, we introduce a unique dataset meticulously curated to encompass scenarios that pose significant challenges for state-of-the-art (SOTA) models. Through fine-tuning selected models, we aim to achieve enhanced localization accuracy. Moreover, we propose a CNN-based classification branch, seamlessly integrated with the detector, facilitating the identification of distinct lane types. This architecture enables informed lane-changing decisions and empowers more resilient ADAS capabilities. We also investigate the effect of using mixed precision training and testing on different models and batch sizes. Experimental evaluations conducted on the widely-used TuSimple dataset, Caltech lane dataset, and our LVLane dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of our model in accurately detecting and classifying lanes amidst challenging scenarios. Our method achieves state-of-the-art classification results on the TuSimple dataset. The code of the work will be published upon the acceptance of the paper.
In the realm of Tiny AI, we introduce "You Only Look at Interested Cells" (YOLIC), an efficient method for object localization and classification on edge devices. Seamlessly blending the strengths of semantic segmentation and object detection, YOLIC offers superior computational efficiency and precision. By adopting Cells of Interest for classification instead of individual pixels, YOLIC encapsulates relevant information, reduces computational load, and enables rough object shape inference. Importantly, the need for bounding box regression is obviated, as YOLIC capitalizes on the predetermined cell configuration that provides information about potential object location, size, and shape. To tackle the issue of single-label classification limitations, a multi-label classification approach is applied to each cell, effectively recognizing overlapping or closely situated objects. This paper presents extensive experiments on multiple datasets, demonstrating that YOLIC achieves detection performance comparable to the state-of-the-art YOLO algorithms while surpassing in speed, exceeding 30fps on a Raspberry Pi 4B CPU. All resources related to this study, including datasets, cell designer, image annotation tool, and source code, have been made publicly available on our project website at //kai3316.github.io/yolic.github.io
Deep neural networks rely on parallel processors for acceleration. To design operators for them, it requires not only good algorithm to reduce complexity, but also sufficient utilization of hardwares. Convolutional layers mainly contain 3 kinds of operators: convolution in forward propagation, deconvolution and dilated-convolution in backward propagation. When executing these operators, 0s are always added to tensors, causing redundant calculations. This paper gives C-K-S algorithm (ConvV2, KS-deconv, Sk-dilated), which skips these 0s in two ways: trim the filters to exclude padded 0s; transform sparse tensors to dense tensors, to avoid inserted 0s in deconvolution and dilated-convolution. In contrast to regular convolution, deconvolution is hard to accelerate due to its complicacy. This paper provides high-performance GPU implementations of C-K-S, and verifies their effectiveness with comparison to PyTorch. According to the experiments, C-K-S has advantages over PyTorch in certain cases, especially in deconvolution on small feature-maps. Further enhancement of C-K-S can be done by making full optimizations oriented at specific GPU architectures.
In this paper we present D.A.V.I.D.E. (Development for an Added Value Infrastructure Designed in Europe), an innovative and energy efficient High Performance Computing cluster designed by E4 Computer Engineering for PRACE (Partnership for Advanced Computing in Europe). D.A.V.I.D.E. is built using best-in-class components (IBM's POWER8-NVLink CPUs, NVIDIA TESLA P100 GPUs, Mellanox InfiniBand EDR 100 Gb/s networking) plus custom hardware and an innovative system middleware software. D.A.V.I.D.E. features (i) a dedicated power monitor interface, built around the BeagleBone Black Board that allows high frequency sampling directly from the power backplane and scalable integration with the internal node telemetry and system level power management software; (ii) a custom-built chassis, based on OpenRack form factor, and liquid cooling that allows the system to be used in modern, energy efficient, datacenter; (iii) software components designed for enabling fine grain power monitoring, power management (i.e. power capping and energy aware job scheduling) and application power profiling, based on dedicated machine learning components. Software APIs are offered to developers and users to tune the computing node performance and power consumption around on the application requirements. The first pilot system that we will deploy at the beginning of 2017, will demonstrate key HPC applications from different fields ported and optimized for this innovative platform.
Current research in the computer vision field mainly focuses on improving Deep Learning (DL) correctness and inference time performance. However, there is still little work on the huge carbon footprint that has training DL models. This study aims to analyze the impact of the model architecture and training environment when training greener computer vision models. We divide this goal into two research questions. First, we analyze the effects of model architecture on achieving greener models while keeping correctness at optimal levels. Second, we study the influence of the training environment on producing greener models. To investigate these relationships, we collect multiple metrics related to energy efficiency and model correctness during the models' training. Then, we outline the trade-offs between the measured energy efficiency and the models' correctness regarding model architecture, and their relationship with the training environment. We conduct this research in the context of a computer vision system for image classification. In conclusion, we show that selecting the proper model architecture and training environment can reduce energy consumption dramatically (up to 98.83\%) at the cost of negligible decreases in correctness. Also, we find evidence that GPUs should scale with the models' computational complexity for better energy efficiency.
Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have been shown to be effective models for different predictive tasks on graph-structured data. Recent work on their expressive power has focused on isomorphism tasks and countable feature spaces. We extend this theoretical framework to include continuous features - which occur regularly in real-world input domains and within the hidden layers of GNNs - and we demonstrate the requirement for multiple aggregation functions in this context. Accordingly, we propose Principal Neighbourhood Aggregation (PNA), a novel architecture combining multiple aggregators with degree-scalers (which generalize the sum aggregator). Finally, we compare the capacity of different models to capture and exploit the graph structure via a novel benchmark containing multiple tasks taken from classical graph theory, alongside existing benchmarks from real-world domains, all of which demonstrate the strength of our model. With this work, we hope to steer some of the GNN research towards new aggregation methods which we believe are essential in the search for powerful and robust models.
In recent years, object detection has experienced impressive progress. Despite these improvements, there is still a significant gap in the performance between the detection of small and large objects. We analyze the current state-of-the-art model, Mask-RCNN, on a challenging dataset, MS COCO. We show that the overlap between small ground-truth objects and the predicted anchors is much lower than the expected IoU threshold. We conjecture this is due to two factors; (1) only a few images are containing small objects, and (2) small objects do not appear enough even within each image containing them. We thus propose to oversample those images with small objects and augment each of those images by copy-pasting small objects many times. It allows us to trade off the quality of the detector on large objects with that on small objects. We evaluate different pasting augmentation strategies, and ultimately, we achieve 9.7\% relative improvement on the instance segmentation and 7.1\% on the object detection of small objects, compared to the current state of the art method on MS COCO.
Deep Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) are a special type of Neural Networks, which have shown state-of-the-art results on various competitive benchmarks. The powerful learning ability of deep CNN is largely achieved with the use of multiple non-linear feature extraction stages that can automatically learn hierarchical representation from the data. Availability of a large amount of data and improvements in the hardware processing units have accelerated the research in CNNs and recently very interesting deep CNN architectures are reported. The recent race in deep CNN architectures for achieving high performance on the challenging benchmarks has shown that the innovative architectural ideas, as well as parameter optimization, can improve the CNN performance on various vision-related tasks. In this regard, different ideas in the CNN design have been explored such as use of different activation and loss functions, parameter optimization, regularization, and restructuring of processing units. However, the major improvement in representational capacity is achieved by the restructuring of the processing units. Especially, the idea of using a block as a structural unit instead of a layer is gaining substantial appreciation. This survey thus focuses on the intrinsic taxonomy present in the recently reported CNN architectures and consequently, classifies the recent innovations in CNN architectures into seven different categories. These seven categories are based on spatial exploitation, depth, multi-path, width, feature map exploitation, channel boosting and attention. Additionally, it covers the elementary understanding of the CNN components and sheds light on the current challenges and applications of CNNs.