Sparse convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have gained significant traction over the past few years as sparse CNNs can drastically decrease the model size and computations, if exploited befittingly, as compared to their dense counterparts. Sparse CNNs often introduce variations in the layer shapes and sizes, which can prevent dense accelerators from performing well on sparse CNN models. Recently proposed sparse accelerators like SCNN, Eyeriss v2, and SparTen, actively exploit the two-sided or full sparsity, that is, sparsity in both weights and activations, for performance gains. These accelerators, however, either have inefficient micro-architecture, which limits their performance, have no support for non-unit stride convolutions and fully-connected (FC) layers, or suffer massively from systematic load imbalance. To circumvent these issues and support both sparse and dense models, we propose Phantom, a multi-threaded, dynamic, and flexible neural computational core. Phantom uses sparse binary mask representation to actively lookahead into sparse computations, and dynamically schedule its computational threads to maximize the thread utilization and throughput. We also generate a two-dimensional (2D) mesh architecture of Phantom neural computational cores, which we refer to as Phantom-2D accelerator, and propose a novel dataflow that supports all layers of a CNN, including unit and non-unit stride convolutions, and FC layers. In addition, Phantom-2D uses a two-level load balancing strategy to minimize the computational idling, thereby, further improving the hardware utilization. To show support for different types of layers, we evaluate the performance of the Phantom architecture on VGG16 and MobileNet. Our simulations show that the Phantom-2D accelerator attains a performance gain of 12x, 4.1x, 1.98x, and 2.36x, over dense architectures, SCNN, SparTen, and Eyeriss v2, respectively.
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Since sparse neural networks usually contain many zero weights, these unnecessary network connections can potentially be eliminated without degrading network performance. Therefore, well-designed sparse neural networks have the potential to significantly reduce FLOPs and computational resources. In this work, we propose a new automatic pruning method - Sparse Connectivity Learning (SCL). Specifically, a weight is re-parameterized as an element-wise multiplication of a trainable weight variable and a binary mask. Thus, network connectivity is fully described by the binary mask, which is modulated by a unit step function. We theoretically prove the fundamental principle of using a straight-through estimator (STE) for network pruning. This principle is that the proxy gradients of STE should be positive, ensuring that mask variables converge at their minima. After finding Leaky ReLU, Softplus, and Identity STEs can satisfy this principle, we propose to adopt Identity STE in SCL for discrete mask relaxation. We find that mask gradients of different features are very unbalanced, hence, we propose to normalize mask gradients of each feature to optimize mask variable training. In order to automatically train sparse masks, we include the total number of network connections as a regularization term in our objective function. As SCL does not require pruning criteria or hyper-parameters defined by designers for network layers, the network is explored in a larger hypothesis space to achieve optimized sparse connectivity for the best performance. SCL overcomes the limitations of existing automatic pruning methods. Experimental results demonstrate that SCL can automatically learn and select important network connections for various baseline network structures. Deep learning models trained by SCL outperform the SOTA human-designed and automatic pruning methods in sparsity, accuracy, and FLOPs reduction.
Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have succeeded in many practical applications. However, their high computation and storage requirements often make them difficult to deploy on resource-constrained devices. In order to tackle this issue, many pruning algorithms have been proposed for CNNs, but most of them can't prune CNNs to a reasonable level. In this paper, we propose a novel algorithm for training and pruning CNNs based on the recursive least squares (RLS) optimization. After training a CNN for some epochs, our algorithm combines inverse input autocorrelation matrices and weight matrices to evaluate and prune unimportant input channels or nodes layer by layer. Then, our algorithm will continue to train the pruned network, and won't do the next pruning until the pruned network recovers the full performance of the old network. Besides for CNNs, the proposed algorithm can be used for feedforward neural networks (FNNs). Three experiments on MNIST, CIFAR-10 and SVHN datasets show that our algorithm can achieve the more reasonable pruning and have higher learning efficiency than other four popular pruning algorithms.
Adder Neural Networks (ANNs) which only contain additions bring us a new way of developing deep neural networks with low energy consumption. Unfortunately, there is an accuracy drop when replacing all convolution filters by adder filters. The main reason here is the optimization difficulty of ANNs using $\ell_1$-norm, in which the estimation of gradient in back propagation is inaccurate. In this paper, we present a novel method for further improving the performance of ANNs without increasing the trainable parameters via a progressive kernel based knowledge distillation (PKKD) method. A convolutional neural network (CNN) with the same architecture is simultaneously initialized and trained as a teacher network, features and weights of ANN and CNN will be transformed to a new space to eliminate the accuracy drop. The similarity is conducted in a higher-dimensional space to disentangle the difference of their distributions using a kernel based method. Finally, the desired ANN is learned based on the information from both the ground-truth and teacher, progressively. The effectiveness of the proposed method for learning ANN with higher performance is then well-verified on several benchmarks. For instance, the ANN-50 trained using the proposed PKKD method obtains a 76.8\% top-1 accuracy on ImageNet dataset, which is 0.6\% higher than that of the ResNet-50.
Graph Convolutional Networks (GCNs) have been widely used due to their outstanding performance in processing graph-structured data. However, the undirected graphs limit their application scope. In this paper, we extend spectral-based graph convolution to directed graphs by using first- and second-order proximity, which can not only retain the connection properties of the directed graph, but also expand the receptive field of the convolution operation. A new GCN model, called DGCN, is then designed to learn representations on the directed graph, leveraging both the first- and second-order proximity information. We empirically show the fact that GCNs working only with DGCNs can encode more useful information from graph and help achieve better performance when generalized to other models. Moreover, extensive experiments on citation networks and co-purchase datasets demonstrate the superiority of our model against the state-of-the-art methods.
During the last decade, Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) have become the de facto standard for various Computer Vision and Machine Learning operations. CNNs are feed-forward Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs) with alternating convolutional and subsampling layers. Deep 2D CNNs with many hidden layers and millions of parameters have the ability to learn complex objects and patterns providing that they can be trained on a massive size visual database with ground-truth labels. With a proper training, this unique ability makes them the primary tool for various engineering applications for 2D signals such as images and video frames. Yet, this may not be a viable option in numerous applications over 1D signals especially when the training data is scarce or application-specific. To address this issue, 1D CNNs have recently been proposed and immediately achieved the state-of-the-art performance levels in several applications such as personalized biomedical data classification and early diagnosis, structural health monitoring, anomaly detection and identification in power electronics and motor-fault detection. Another major advantage is that a real-time and low-cost hardware implementation is feasible due to the simple and compact configuration of 1D CNNs that perform only 1D convolutions (scalar multiplications and additions). This paper presents a comprehensive review of the general architecture and principals of 1D CNNs along with their major engineering applications, especially focused on the recent progress in this field. Their state-of-the-art performance is highlighted concluding with their unique properties. The benchmark datasets and the principal 1D CNN software used in those applications are also publically shared in a dedicated website.
In standard Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs), the receptive fields of artificial neurons in each layer are designed to share the same size. It is well-known in the neuroscience community that the receptive field size of visual cortical neurons are modulated by the stimulus, which has been rarely considered in constructing CNNs. We propose a dynamic selection mechanism in CNNs that allows each neuron to adaptively adjust its receptive field size based on multiple scales of input information. A building block called Selective Kernel (SK) unit is designed, in which multiple branches with different kernel sizes are fused using softmax attention that is guided by the information in these branches. Different attentions on these branches yield different sizes of the effective receptive fields of neurons in the fusion layer. Multiple SK units are stacked to a deep network termed Selective Kernel Networks (SKNets). On the ImageNet and CIFAR benchmarks, we empirically show that SKNet outperforms the existing state-of-the-art architectures with lower model complexity. Detailed analyses show that the neurons in SKNet can capture target objects with different scales, which verifies the capability of neurons for adaptively adjusting their recpeitve field sizes according to the input. The code and models are available at //github.com/implus/SKNet.
Graph Convolutional Networks (GCNs) and their variants have experienced significant attention and have become the de facto methods for learning graph representations. GCNs derive inspiration primarily from recent deep learning approaches, and as a result, may inherit unnecessary complexity and redundant computation. In this paper, we reduce this excess complexity through successively removing nonlinearities and collapsing weight matrices between consecutive layers. We theoretically analyze the resulting linear model and show that it corresponds to a fixed low-pass filter followed by a linear classifier. Notably, our experimental evaluation demonstrates that these simplifications do not negatively impact accuracy in many downstream applications. Moreover, the resulting model scales to larger datasets, is naturally interpretable, and yields up to two orders of magnitude speedup over FastGCN.
We present an overview of techniques for quantizing convolutional neural networks for inference with integer weights and activations. Per-channel quantization of weights and per-layer quantization of activations to 8-bits of precision post-training produces classification accuracies within 2% of floating point networks for a wide variety of CNN architectures. Model sizes can be reduced by a factor of 4 by quantizing weights to 8-bits, even when 8-bit arithmetic is not supported. This can be achieved with simple, post training quantization of weights.We benchmark latencies of quantized networks on CPUs and DSPs and observe a speedup of 2x-3x for quantized implementations compared to floating point on CPUs. Speedups of up to 10x are observed on specialized processors with fixed point SIMD capabilities, like the Qualcomm QDSPs with HVX. Quantization-aware training can provide further improvements, reducing the gap to floating point to 1% at 8-bit precision. Quantization-aware training also allows for reducing the precision of weights to four bits with accuracy losses ranging from 2% to 10%, with higher accuracy drop for smaller networks.We introduce tools in TensorFlow and TensorFlowLite for quantizing convolutional networks and review best practices for quantization-aware training to obtain high accuracy with quantized weights and activations. We recommend that per-channel quantization of weights and per-layer quantization of activations be the preferred quantization scheme for hardware acceleration and kernel optimization. We also propose that future processors and hardware accelerators for optimized inference support precisions of 4, 8 and 16 bits.
Deep learning (DL) based semantic segmentation methods have been providing state-of-the-art performance in the last few years. More specifically, these techniques have been successfully applied to medical image classification, segmentation, and detection tasks. One deep learning technique, U-Net, has become one of the most popular for these applications. In this paper, we propose a Recurrent Convolutional Neural Network (RCNN) based on U-Net as well as a Recurrent Residual Convolutional Neural Network (RRCNN) based on U-Net models, which are named RU-Net and R2U-Net respectively. The proposed models utilize the power of U-Net, Residual Network, as well as RCNN. There are several advantages of these proposed architectures for segmentation tasks. First, a residual unit helps when training deep architecture. Second, feature accumulation with recurrent residual convolutional layers ensures better feature representation for segmentation tasks. Third, it allows us to design better U-Net architecture with same number of network parameters with better performance for medical image segmentation. The proposed models are tested on three benchmark datasets such as blood vessel segmentation in retina images, skin cancer segmentation, and lung lesion segmentation. The experimental results show superior performance on segmentation tasks compared to equivalent models including U-Net and residual U-Net (ResU-Net).
Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) have gained significant traction in the field of machine learning, particularly due to their high accuracy in visual recognition. Recent works have pushed the performance of GPU implementations of CNNs to significantly improve their classification and training times. With these improvements, many frameworks have become available for implementing CNNs on both CPUs and GPUs, with no support for FPGA implementations. In this work we present a modified version of the popular CNN framework Caffe, with FPGA support. This allows for classification using CNN models and specialized FPGA implementations with the flexibility of reprogramming the device when necessary, seamless memory transactions between host and device, simple-to-use test benches, and the ability to create pipelined layer implementations. To validate the framework, we use the Xilinx SDAccel environment to implement an FPGA-based Winograd convolution engine and show that the FPGA layer can be used alongside other layers running on a host processor to run several popular CNNs (AlexNet, GoogleNet, VGG A, Overfeat). The results show that our framework achieves 50 GFLOPS across 3x3 convolutions in the benchmarks. This is achieved within a practical framework, which will aid in future development of FPGA-based CNNs.
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