The recently proposed optimization algorithm for deep neural networks Sharpness Aware Minimization (SAM) suggests perturbing parameters before gradient calculation by a gradient ascent step to guide the optimization into parameter space regions of flat loss. While significant generalization improvements and thus reduction of overfitting could be demonstrated, the computational costs are doubled due to the additionally needed gradient calculation, making SAM unfeasible in case of limited computationally capacities. Motivated by Nesterov Accelerated Gradient (NAG) we propose Momentum-SAM (MSAM), which perturbs parameters in the direction of the accumulated momentum vector to achieve low sharpness without significant computational overhead or memory demands over SGD or Adam. We evaluate MSAM in detail and reveal insights on separable mechanisms of NAG, SAM and MSAM regarding training optimization and generalization. Code is available at //github.com/MarlonBecker/MSAM.
Brain-inspired spiking neural networks (SNNs) have gained prominence in the field of neuromorphic computing owing to their low energy consumption during feedforward inference on neuromorphic hardware. However, it remains an open challenge how to effectively benefit from the sparse event-driven property of SNNs to minimize backpropagation learning costs. In this paper, we conduct a comprehensive examination of the existing event-driven learning algorithms, reveal their limitations, and propose novel solutions to overcome them. Specifically, we introduce two novel event-driven learning methods: the spike-timing-dependent event-driven (STD-ED) and membrane-potential-dependent event-driven (MPD-ED) algorithms. These proposed algorithms leverage precise neuronal spike timing and membrane potential, respectively, for effective learning. The two methods are extensively evaluated on static and neuromorphic datasets to confirm their superior performance. They outperform existing event-driven counterparts by up to 2.51% for STD-ED and 6.79% for MPD-ED on the CIFAR-100 dataset. In addition, we theoretically and experimentally validate the energy efficiency of our methods on neuromorphic hardware. On-chip learning experiments achieved a remarkable 30-fold reduction in energy consumption over time-step-based surrogate gradient methods. The demonstrated efficiency and efficacy of the proposed event-driven learning methods emphasize their potential to significantly advance the fields of neuromorphic computing, offering promising avenues for energy-efficiency applications.
Field-Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) accelerators have proven successful in handling latency- and resource-critical deep neural network (DNN) inference tasks. Among the most computationally intensive operations in a neural network (NN) is the dot product between the feature and weight vectors. Thus, some previous FPGA acceleration works have proposed mapping neurons with quantized inputs and outputs directly to lookup tables (LUTs) for hardware implementation. In these works, the boundaries of the neurons coincide with the boundaries of the LUTs. We propose relaxing these boundaries and mapping entire sub-networks to a single LUT. As the sub-networks are absorbed within the LUT, the NN topology and precision within a partition do not affect the size of the lookup tables generated. Therefore, we utilize fully connected layers with floating-point precision inside each partition, which benefit from being universal function approximators, with rigid sparsity and quantization enforced only between partitions, where the NN topology becomes exposed to the circuit topology. Although cheap to implement, this approach can lead to very deep NNs, and so to tackle challenges like vanishing gradients, we also introduce skip connections inside the partitions. The resulting methodology can be seen as training DNNs with a specific sparsity pattern that allows them to be mapped to much shallower circuit-level networks, thereby significantly improving latency. We validate our proposed method on a known latency-critical task, jet substructure tagging, and on the classical computer vision task, the digit classification using MNIST. Our approach allows for greater function expressivity within the LUTs compared to existing work, leading to lower latency NNs for the same accuracy.
Social networks are often associated with rich side information, such as texts and images. While numerous methods have been developed to identify communities from pairwise interactions, they usually ignore such side information. In this work, we study an extension of the Stochastic Block Model (SBM), a widely used statistical framework for community detection, that integrates vectorial edges covariates: the Vectorial Edges Covariates Stochastic Block Model (VEC-SBM). We propose a novel algorithm based on iterative refinement techniques and show that it optimally recovers the latent communities under the VEC-SBM. Furthermore, we rigorously assess the added value of leveraging edge's side information in the community detection process. We complement our theoretical results with numerical experiments on synthetic and semi-synthetic data.
Quantum Annealing (QA)-accelerated MIMO detection is an emerging research approach in the context of NextG wireless networks. The opportunity is to enable large MIMO systems and thus improve wireless performance. The approach aims to leverage QA to expedite the computation required for theoretically optimal but computationally-demanding Maximum Likelihood detection to overcome the limitations of the currently deployed linear detectors. This paper presents \textbf{X-ResQ}, a QA-based MIMO detector system featuring fine-grained quantum task parallelism that is uniquely enabled by the Reverse Annealing (RA) protocol. Unlike prior designs, X-ResQ has many desirable system properties for a parallel QA detector and has effectively improved detection performance as more qubits are assigned. In our evaluations on a state-of-the-art quantum annealer, fully parallel X-ResQ achieves near-optimal throughput (over 10 bits/s/Hz) for $4\times6$ MIMO with 16-QAM using six levels of parallelism with 240 qubits and $220~\mu$s QA compute time, achieving 2.5--5$\times$ gains compared against other tested detectors. For more comprehensive evaluations, we implement and evaluate X-ResQ in the non-quantum digital setting. This non-quantum X-ResQ demonstration showcases the potential to realize ultra-large $1024\times1024$ MIMO, significantly outperforming other MIMO detectors, including the state-of-the-art RA detector classically implemented in the same way.
Deep neural networks (DNNs) have achieved great breakthroughs in many fields such as image classification and natural language processing. However, the execution of DNNs needs to conduct massive numbers of multiply-accumulate (MAC) operations on hardware and thus incurs a large power consumption. To address this challenge, we propose a novel digital MAC design based on encoding. In this new design, the multipliers are replaced by simple logic gates to project the results onto a wide bit representation. These bits carry individual position weights, which can be trained for specific neural networks to enhance inference accuracy. The outputs of the new multipliers are added by bit-wise weighted accumulation and the accumulation results are compatible with existing computing platforms accelerating neural networks with either uniform or non-uniform quantization. Since the multiplication function is replaced by simple logic projection, the critical paths in the resulting circuits become much shorter. Correspondingly, pipelining stages in the MAC array can be reduced, leading to a significantly smaller area as well as a better power efficiency. The proposed design has been synthesized and verified by ResNet18-Cifar10, ResNet20-Cifar100 and ResNet50-ImageNet. The experimental results confirmed the reduction of circuit area by up to 79.63% and the reduction of power consumption of executing DNNs by up to 70.18%, while the accuracy of the neural networks can still be well maintained.
Large Language Models (LLMs) are a class of generative AI models built using the Transformer network, capable of leveraging vast datasets to identify, summarize, translate, predict, and generate language. LLMs promise to revolutionize society, yet training these foundational models poses immense challenges. Semantic vector search within large language models is a potent technique that can significantly enhance search result accuracy and relevance. Unlike traditional keyword-based search methods, semantic search utilizes the meaning and context of words to grasp the intent behind queries and deliver more precise outcomes. Elasticsearch emerges as one of the most popular tools for implementing semantic search an exceptionally scalable and robust search engine designed for indexing and searching extensive datasets. In this article, we delve into the fundamentals of semantic search and explore how to harness Elasticsearch and Transformer models to bolster large language model processing paradigms. We gain a comprehensive understanding of semantic search principles and acquire practical skills for implementing semantic search in real-world model application scenarios.
In recent years, Face Image Quality Assessment (FIQA) has become an indispensable part of the face recognition system to guarantee the stability and reliability of recognition performance in an unconstrained scenario. For this purpose, the FIQA method should consider both the intrinsic property and the recognizability of the face image. Most previous works aim to estimate the sample-wise embedding uncertainty or pair-wise similarity as the quality score, which only considers the information from partial intra-class. However, these methods ignore the valuable information from the inter-class, which is for estimating to the recognizability of face image. In this work, we argue that a high-quality face image should be similar to its intra-class samples and dissimilar to its inter-class samples. Thus, we propose a novel unsupervised FIQA method that incorporates Similarity Distribution Distance for Face Image Quality Assessment (SDD-FIQA). Our method generates quality pseudo-labels by calculating the Wasserstein Distance (WD) between the intra-class similarity distributions and inter-class similarity distributions. With these quality pseudo-labels, we are capable of training a regression network for quality prediction. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets demonstrate that the proposed SDD-FIQA surpasses the state-of-the-arts by an impressive margin. Meanwhile, our method shows good generalization across different recognition systems.
Normalization is known to help the optimization of deep neural networks. Curiously, different architectures require specialized normalization methods. In this paper, we study what normalization is effective for Graph Neural Networks (GNNs). First, we adapt and evaluate the existing methods from other domains to GNNs. Faster convergence is achieved with InstanceNorm compared to BatchNorm and LayerNorm. We provide an explanation by showing that InstanceNorm serves as a preconditioner for GNNs, but such preconditioning effect is weaker with BatchNorm due to the heavy batch noise in graph datasets. Second, we show that the shift operation in InstanceNorm results in an expressiveness degradation of GNNs for highly regular graphs. We address this issue by proposing GraphNorm with a learnable shift. Empirically, GNNs with GraphNorm converge faster compared to GNNs using other normalization. GraphNorm also improves the generalization of GNNs, achieving better performance on graph classification benchmarks.
With the advent of deep neural networks, learning-based approaches for 3D reconstruction have gained popularity. However, unlike for images, in 3D there is no canonical representation which is both computationally and memory efficient yet allows for representing high-resolution geometry of arbitrary topology. Many of the state-of-the-art learning-based 3D reconstruction approaches can hence only represent very coarse 3D geometry or are limited to a restricted domain. In this paper, we propose occupancy networks, a new representation for learning-based 3D reconstruction methods. Occupancy networks implicitly represent the 3D surface as the continuous decision boundary of a deep neural network classifier. In contrast to existing approaches, our representation encodes a description of the 3D output at infinite resolution without excessive memory footprint. We validate that our representation can efficiently encode 3D structure and can be inferred from various kinds of input. Our experiments demonstrate competitive results, both qualitatively and quantitatively, for the challenging tasks of 3D reconstruction from single images, noisy point clouds and coarse discrete voxel grids. We believe that occupancy networks will become a useful tool in a wide variety of learning-based 3D tasks.
Recurrent neural nets (RNN) and convolutional neural nets (CNN) are widely used on NLP tasks to capture the long-term and local dependencies, respectively. Attention mechanisms have recently attracted enormous interest due to their highly parallelizable computation, significantly less training time, and flexibility in modeling dependencies. We propose a novel attention mechanism in which the attention between elements from input sequence(s) is directional and multi-dimensional (i.e., feature-wise). A light-weight neural net, "Directional Self-Attention Network (DiSAN)", is then proposed to learn sentence embedding, based solely on the proposed attention without any RNN/CNN structure. DiSAN is only composed of a directional self-attention with temporal order encoded, followed by a multi-dimensional attention that compresses the sequence into a vector representation. Despite its simple form, DiSAN outperforms complicated RNN models on both prediction quality and time efficiency. It achieves the best test accuracy among all sentence encoding methods and improves the most recent best result by 1.02% on the Stanford Natural Language Inference (SNLI) dataset, and shows state-of-the-art test accuracy on the Stanford Sentiment Treebank (SST), Multi-Genre natural language inference (MultiNLI), Sentences Involving Compositional Knowledge (SICK), Customer Review, MPQA, TREC question-type classification and Subjectivity (SUBJ) datasets.