In this paper, we present a general and effective framework for Neural Architecture Search (NAS), named PredNAS. The motivation is that given a differentiable performance estimation function, we can directly optimize the architecture towards higher performance by simple gradient ascent. Specifically, we adopt a neural predictor as the performance predictor. Surprisingly, PredNAS can achieve state-of-the-art performances on NAS benchmarks with only a few training samples (less than 100). To validate the universality of our method, we also apply our method on large-scale tasks and compare our method with RegNet on ImageNet and YOLOX on MSCOCO. The results demonstrate that our PredNAS can explore novel architectures with competitive performances under specific computational complexity constraints.
In this paper, based on the spatio-temporal correlation of sensor nodes in the Internet of Things (IoT), a Spatio-temporal Scope information model (SSIM) is proposed to quantify the scope valuable information of sensor data, which decays with space and time, to guide the system for efficient decision making in the sensed region. A simple sensor monitoring system containing three sensor nodes is considered, and two optimal scheduling decision mechanisms, single-step optimal and long-term optimal decision mechanisms, are proposed for the optimization problem. For the single-step mechanism, the scheduling results are analyzed theoretically, and approximate numerical bounds on the node layout between some of the scheduling results are obtained, consistent with the simulation results. For the long-term mechanism, the scheduling results with different node layouts are obtained using the Q-learning algorithm. The performance of the two mechanisms is verified by conducting experiments using the relative humidity dataset, and the differences in performance of the two mechanisms are discussed; in addition, the limitations of the model are summarized.
Neural Architecture Search (NAS) for automatically finding the optimal network architecture has shown some success with competitive performances in various computer vision tasks. However, NAS in general requires a tremendous amount of computations. Thus reducing computational cost has emerged as an important issue. Most of the attempts so far has been based on manual approaches, and often the architectures developed from such efforts dwell in the balance of the network optimality and the search cost. Additionally, recent NAS methods for image restoration generally do not consider dynamic operations that may transform dimensions of feature maps because of the dimensionality mismatch in tensor calculations. This can greatly limit NAS in its search for optimal network structure. To address these issues, we re-frame the optimal search problem by focusing at component block level. From previous work, it's been shown that an effective denoising block can be connected in series to further improve the network performance. By focusing at block level, the search space of reinforcement learning becomes significantly smaller and evaluation process can be conducted more rapidly. In addition, we integrate an innovative dimension matching modules for dealing with spatial and channel-wise mismatch that may occur in the optimal design search. This allows much flexibility in optimal network search within the cell block. With these modules, then we employ reinforcement learning in search of an optimal image denoising network at a module level. Computational efficiency of our proposed Denoising Prior Neural Architecture Search (DPNAS) was demonstrated by having it complete an optimal architecture search for an image restoration task by just one day with a single GPU.
Effective inclusion of physics-based knowledge into deep neural network models of dynamical systems can greatly improve data efficiency and generalization. Such a-priori knowledge might arise from physical principles (e.g., conservation laws) or from the system's design (e.g., the Jacobian matrix of a robot), even if large portions of the system dynamics remain unknown. We develop a framework to learn dynamics models from trajectory data while incorporating a-priori system knowledge as inductive bias. More specifically, the proposed framework uses physics-based side information to inform the structure of the neural network itself, and to place constraints on the values of the outputs and the internal states of the model. It represents the system's vector field as a composition of known and unknown functions, the latter of which are parametrized by neural networks. The physics-informed constraints are enforced via the augmented Lagrangian method during the model's training. We experimentally demonstrate the benefits of the proposed approach on a variety of dynamical systems -- including a benchmark suite of robotics environments featuring large state spaces, non-linear dynamics, external forces, contact forces, and control inputs. By exploiting a-priori system knowledge during training, the proposed approach learns to predict the system dynamics two orders of magnitude more accurately than a baseline approach that does not include prior knowledge, given the same training dataset.
Lung cancer tends to be detected at an advanced stage, resulting in a high patient mortality rate. Thus, much recent research has focused on early disease detection Bronchoscopy is the procedure of choice for an effective noninvasive way of detecting early manifestations (bronchial lesions) of lung cancer. In particular, autofluorescence bronchoscopy (AFB) discriminates the autofluorescence properties of normal (green) and diseased tissue (reddish brown) with different colors. Because recent studies show AFB's high sensitivity in searching lesions, it has become a potentially pivotal method in bronchoscopic airway exams. Unfortunately, manual inspection of AFB video is extremely tedious and error prone, while limited effort has been expended toward potentially more robust automatic AFB lesion analysis. We propose a real-time (processing throughput of 27 frames/sec) deep-learning architecture dubbed ESFPNet for accurate segmentation and robust detection of bronchial lesions in AFB video streams. The architecture features an encoder structure that exploits pretrained Mix Transformer (MiT) encoders and an efficient stage-wise feature pyramid (ESFP) decoder structure. Segmentation results from the AFB airway-exam videos of 20 lung cancer patients indicate that our approach gives a mean Dice index = 0.756 and an average Intersection of Union = 0.624, results that are superior to those generated by other recent architectures. Thus, ESFPNet gives the physician a potential tool for confident real-time lesion segmentation and detection during a live bronchoscopic airway exam. Moreover, our model shows promising potential applicability to other domains, as evidenced by its state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance on the CVC-ClinicDB, ETIS-LaribPolypDB datasets, and superior performance on the Kvasir, CVC-ColonDB datasets.
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.
An effective and efficient architecture performance evaluation scheme is essential for the success of Neural Architecture Search (NAS). To save computational cost, most of existing NAS algorithms often train and evaluate intermediate neural architectures on a small proxy dataset with limited training epochs. But it is difficult to expect an accurate performance estimation of an architecture in such a coarse evaluation way. This paper advocates a new neural architecture evaluation scheme, which aims to determine which architecture would perform better instead of accurately predict the absolute architecture performance. Therefore, we propose a \textbf{relativistic} architecture performance predictor in NAS (ReNAS). We encode neural architectures into feature tensors, and further refining the representations with the predictor. The proposed relativistic performance predictor can be deployed in discrete searching methods to search for the desired architectures without additional evaluation. Experimental results on NAS-Bench-101 dataset suggests that, sampling 424 ($0.1\%$ of the entire search space) neural architectures and their corresponding validation performance is already enough for learning an accurate architecture performance predictor. The accuracies of our searched neural architectures on NAS-Bench-101 and NAS-Bench-201 datasets are higher than that of the state-of-the-art methods and show the priority of the proposed method.
The growing energy and performance costs of deep learning have driven the community to reduce the size of neural networks by selectively pruning components. Similarly to their biological counterparts, sparse networks generalize just as well, if not better than, the original dense networks. Sparsity can reduce the memory footprint of regular networks to fit mobile devices, as well as shorten training time for ever growing networks. In this paper, we survey prior work on sparsity in deep learning and provide an extensive tutorial of sparsification for both inference and training. We describe approaches to remove and add elements of neural networks, different training strategies to achieve model sparsity, and mechanisms to exploit sparsity in practice. Our work distills ideas from more than 300 research papers and provides guidance to practitioners who wish to utilize sparsity today, as well as to researchers whose goal is to push the frontier forward. We include the necessary background on mathematical methods in sparsification, describe phenomena such as early structure adaptation, the intricate relations between sparsity and the training process, and show techniques for achieving acceleration on real hardware. We also define a metric of pruned parameter efficiency that could serve as a baseline for comparison of different sparse networks. We close by speculating on how sparsity can improve future workloads and outline major open problems in the field.
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.
Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) for representation learning of graphs broadly follow a neighborhood aggregation framework, where the representation vector of a node is computed by recursively aggregating and transforming feature vectors of its neighboring nodes. Many GNN variants have been proposed and have achieved state-of-the-art results on both node and graph classification tasks. However, despite GNNs revolutionizing graph representation learning, there is limited understanding of their representational properties and limitations. Here, we present a theoretical framework for analyzing the expressive power of GNNs in capturing different graph structures. Our results characterize the discriminative power of popular GNN variants, such as Graph Convolutional Networks and GraphSAGE, and show that they cannot learn to distinguish certain simple graph structures. We then develop a simple architecture that is provably the most expressive among the class of GNNs and is as powerful as the Weisfeiler-Lehman graph isomorphism test. We empirically validate our theoretical findings on a number of graph classification benchmarks, and demonstrate that our model achieves state-of-the-art performance.
Image segmentation is considered to be one of the critical tasks in hyperspectral remote sensing image processing. Recently, convolutional neural network (CNN) has established itself as a powerful model in segmentation and classification by demonstrating excellent performances. The use of a graphical model such as a conditional random field (CRF) contributes further in capturing contextual information and thus improving the segmentation performance. In this paper, we propose a method to segment hyperspectral images by considering both spectral and spatial information via a combined framework consisting of CNN and CRF. We use multiple spectral cubes to learn deep features using CNN, and then formulate deep CRF with CNN-based unary and pairwise potential functions to effectively extract the semantic correlations between patches consisting of three-dimensional data cubes. Effective piecewise training is applied in order to avoid the computationally expensive iterative CRF inference. Furthermore, we introduce a deep deconvolution network that improves the segmentation masks. We also introduce a new dataset and experimented our proposed method on it along with several widely adopted benchmark datasets to evaluate the effectiveness of our method. By comparing our results with those from several state-of-the-art models, we show the promising potential of our method.