Energy consumption from selecting, training and deploying deep learning models has continued to increase over the past few years. Our goal in this work is to support the design of energy-efficient deep learning models that are easier to train with lower compute resources, practical to deploy in real-world edge/mobile computing settings and environmentally sustainable. Tabular benchmarks for neural architecture search (NAS) allow the evaluation of NAS strategies at lower computational cost by providing pre-computed performance statistics. In this work, we suggest including energy efficiency as an additional performance criterion to NAS and present an updated tabular benchmark by including information on energy consumption and carbon footprint for different architectures. The benchmark called EC-NAS is made available open-source to support energy consumption-aware NAS research. EC-NAS also includes a surrogate model for predicting energy consumption, and helps us reduce the overall energy cost of creating this dataset. We demonstrate the usefulness of EC-NAS by applying multi-objective optimisation algorithms that reveal the trade-off between energy consumption and accuracy, showing that it is possible to discover energy-efficient architectures with little to no loss in performance.
相關內容
Recently, the weight-sharing technique has significantly speeded up the training and evaluation procedure of neural architecture search. However, most existing weight-sharing strategies are solely based on experience or observation, which makes the searching results lack interpretability and rationality. In addition, due to the negligence of fairness, current methods are prone to make misjudgments in module evaluation. To address these problems, we propose a novel neural architecture search algorithm based on dynamical isometry. We use the fix point analysis method in the mean field theory to analyze the dynamics behavior in the steady state random neural network, and how dynamic isometry guarantees the fairness of weight-sharing based NAS. Meanwhile, we prove that our module selection strategy is rigorous fair by estimating the generalization error of all modules with well-conditioned Jacobian. Extensive experiments show that, with the same size, the architecture searched by the proposed method can achieve state-of-the-art top-1 validation accuracy on ImageNet classification. In addition, we demonstrate that our method is able to achieve better and more stable training performance without loss of generality.
Monumental advances in deep learning have led to unprecedented achievements across various domains. While the performance of deep neural networks is indubitable, the architectural design and interpretability of such models are nontrivial. Research has been introduced to automate the design of neural network architectures through neural architecture search (NAS). Recent progress has made these methods more pragmatic by exploiting distributed computation and novel optimization algorithms. However, there is little work in optimizing architectures for interpretability. To this end, we propose a multi-objective distributed NAS framework that optimizes for both task performance and "introspectability," a surrogate metric for aspects of interpretability. We leverage the non-dominated sorting genetic algorithm (NSGA-II) and explainable AI (XAI) techniques to reward architectures that can be better comprehended by domain experts. The framework is evaluated on several image classification datasets. We demonstrate that jointly optimizing for task error and introspectability leads to more disentangled and debuggable architectures that perform within tolerable error.
Deep learning is increasingly impacting various aspects of contemporary society. Artificial neural networks have emerged as the dominant models for solving an expanding range of tasks. The introduction of Neural Architecture Search (NAS) techniques, which enable the automatic design of task-optimal networks, has led to remarkable advances. However, the NAS process is typically associated with long execution times and significant computational resource requirements. Once-For-All (OFA) and its successor, Once-For-All-2 (OFAv2), have been developed to mitigate these challenges. While maintaining exceptional performance and eliminating the need for retraining, they aim to build a single super-network model capable of directly extracting sub-networks satisfying different constraints. Neural Architecture Transfer (NAT) was developed to maximise the effectiveness of extracting sub-networks from a super-network. In this paper, we present NATv2, an extension of NAT that improves multi-objective search algorithms applied to dynamic super-network architectures. NATv2 achieves qualitative improvements in the extractable sub-networks by exploiting the improved super-networks generated by OFAv2 and incorporating new policies for initialisation, pre-processing and updating its networks archive. In addition, a post-processing pipeline based on fine-tuning is introduced. Experimental results show that NATv2 successfully improves NAT and is highly recommended for investigating high-performance architectures with a minimal number of parameters.
A Survey on Explainable AI for 6G O-RAN: Architecture, Use Cases, Challenges and Research Directions
The recent O-RAN specifications promote the evolution of RAN architecture by function disaggregation, adoption of open interfaces, and instantiation of a hierarchical closed-loop control architecture managed by RAN Intelligent Controllers (RICs) entities. This paves the road to novel data-driven network management approaches based on programmable logic. Aided by Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML), novel solutions targeting traditionally unsolved RAN management issues can be devised. Nevertheless, the adoption of such smart and autonomous systems is limited by the current inability of human operators to understand the decision process of such AI/ML solutions, affecting their trust in such novel tools. eXplainable AI (XAI) aims at solving this issue, enabling human users to better understand and effectively manage the emerging generation of artificially intelligent schemes, reducing the human-to-machine barrier. In this survey, we provide a summary of the XAI methods and metrics before studying their deployment over the O-RAN Alliance RAN architecture along with its main building blocks. We then present various use-cases and discuss the automation of XAI pipelines for O-RAN as well as the underlying security aspects. We also review some projects/standards that tackle this area. Finally, we identify different challenges and research directions that may arise from the heavy adoption of AI/ML decision entities in this context, focusing on how XAI can help to interpret, understand, and improve trust in O-RAN operational networks.
Spiking Transformers have gained considerable attention because they achieve both the energy efficiency of Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) and the high capacity of Transformers. However, the existing Spiking Transformer architectures, derived from ANNs, exhibit a notable architectural gap, resulting in suboptimal performance compared to their ANN counterparts. Traditional approaches to discovering optimal architectures primarily rely on either manual procedures, which are time-consuming, or Neural Architecture Search (NAS) methods, which are usually expensive in terms of memory footprints and computation time. To address these limitations, we introduce AutoST, a training-free NAS method for Spiking Transformers, to rapidly identify high-performance and energy-efficient Spiking Transformer architectures. Unlike existing training-free NAS methods, which struggle with the non-differentiability and high sparsity inherent in SNNs, we propose to utilize Floating-Point Operations (FLOPs) as a performance metric, which is independent of model computations and training dynamics, leading to a stronger correlation with performance. Moreover, to enable the search for energy-efficient architectures, we leverage activation patterns during initialization to estimate the energy consumption of Spiking Transformers. Our extensive experiments show that AutoST models outperform state-of-the-art manually or automatically designed SNN architectures on static and neuromorphic datasets, while significantly reducing energy consumption.
The rapid advances in Vision Transformer (ViT) refresh the state-of-the-art performances in various vision tasks, overshadowing the conventional CNN-based models. This ignites a few recent striking-back research in the CNN world showing that pure CNN models can achieve as good performance as ViT models when carefully tuned. While encouraging, designing such high-performance CNN models is challenging, requiring non-trivial prior knowledge of network design. To this end, a novel framework termed Mathematical Architecture Design for Deep CNN (DeepMAD) is proposed to design high-performance CNN models in a principled way. In DeepMAD, a CNN network is modeled as an information processing system whose expressiveness and effectiveness can be analytically formulated by their structural parameters. Then a constrained mathematical programming (MP) problem is proposed to optimize these structural parameters. The MP problem can be easily solved by off-the-shelf MP solvers on CPUs with a small memory footprint. In addition, DeepMAD is a pure mathematical framework: no GPU or training data is required during network design. The superiority of DeepMAD is validated on multiple large-scale computer vision benchmark datasets. Notably on ImageNet-1k, only using conventional convolutional layers, DeepMAD achieves 0.7% and 1.5% higher top-1 accuracy than ConvNeXt and Swin on Tiny level, and 0.8% and 0.9% higher on Small level.
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.
It has been a long time that computer architecture and systems are optimized to enable efficient execution of machine learning (ML) algorithms or models. Now, it is time to reconsider the relationship between ML and systems, and let ML transform the way that computer architecture and systems are designed. This embraces a twofold meaning: the improvement of designers' productivity, and the completion of the virtuous cycle. In this paper, we present a comprehensive review of work that applies ML for system design, which can be grouped into two major categories, ML-based modelling that involves predictions of performance metrics or some other criteria of interest, and ML-based design methodology that directly leverages ML as the design tool. For ML-based modelling, we discuss existing studies based on their target level of system, ranging from the circuit level to the architecture/system level. For ML-based design methodology, we follow a bottom-up path to review current work, with a scope of (micro-)architecture design (memory, branch prediction, NoC), coordination between architecture/system and workload (resource allocation and management, data center management, and security), compiler, and design automation. We further provide a future vision of opportunities and potential directions, and envision that applying ML for computer architecture and systems would thrive in the community.
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.
Deep Learning has enabled remarkable progress over the last years on a variety of tasks, such as image recognition, speech recognition, and machine translation. One crucial aspect for this progress are novel neural architectures. Currently employed architectures have mostly been developed manually by human experts, which is a time-consuming and error-prone process. Because of this, there is growing interest in automated neural architecture search methods. We provide an overview of existing work in this field of research and categorize them according to three dimensions: search space, search strategy, and performance estimation strategy.
注冊地址： 北京市海淀區羊坊店路18號2幢3層301-191