Architectural design is a highly complex practice that involves a wide diversity of disciplines, technologies, proprietary design software, expertise, and an almost infinite number of constraints, across a vast array of design tasks. Enabling intuitive, accessible, and scalable design processes is an important step towards performance-driven and sustainable design for all. To that end, we introduce Architext, a novel semantic generation assistive tool. Architext enables design generation with only natural language prompts, given to large-scale Language Models, as input. We conduct a thorough quantitative evaluation of Architext's downstream task performance, focusing on semantic accuracy and diversity for a number of pre-trained language models ranging from 120 million to 6 billion parameters. Architext models are able to learn the specific design task, generating valid residential layouts at a near 100% rate. Accuracy shows great improvement when scaling the models, with the largest model (GPT-J) yielding impressive accuracy ranging between 25% to over 80% for different prompt categories. We open source the finetuned Architext models and our synthetic dataset, hoping to inspire experimentation in this exciting area of design research.
Despite the significant advances achieved in Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs), their design process remains notoriously tedious, depending primarily on intuition, experience and trial-and-error. This human-dependent process is often time-consuming and prone to errors. Furthermore, the models are generally bound to their training contexts, with no considerations to their surrounding environments. Continual adaptiveness and automation of neural networks is of paramount importance to several domains where model accessibility is limited after deployment (e.g IoT devices, self-driving vehicles, etc.). Additionally, even accessible models require frequent maintenance post-deployment to overcome issues such as Concept/Data Drift, which can be cumbersome and restrictive. By leveraging and combining approaches from Neural Architecture Search (NAS) and Continual Learning (CL), more robust and adaptive agents can be developed. This study conducts the first extensive review on the intersection between NAS and CL, formalizing the prospective Continually-Adaptive Neural Networks (CANNs) paradigm and outlining research directions for lifelong autonomous ANNs.
Change detection using earth observation data plays a vital role in quantifying the impact of disasters in affected areas. While data sources like Sentinel-2 provide rich optical information, they are often hindered by cloud cover, limiting their usage in disaster scenarios. However, leveraging pre-disaster optical data can offer valuable contextual information about the area such as landcover type, vegetation cover, soil types, enabling a better understanding of the disaster's impact. In this study, we develop a model to assess the contribution of pre-disaster Sentinel-2 data in change detection tasks, focusing on disaster-affected areas. The proposed Context-Aware Change Detection Network (CACDN) utilizes a combination of pre-disaster Sentinel-2 data, pre and post-disaster Sentinel-1 data and ancillary Digital Elevation Models (DEM) data. The model is validated on flood and landslide detection and evaluated using three metrics: Area Under the Precision-Recall Curve (AUPRC), Intersection over Union (IoU), and mean IoU. The preliminary results show significant improvement (4\%, AUPRC, 3-7\% IoU, 3-6\% mean IoU) in model's change detection capabilities when incorporated with pre-disaster optical data reflecting the effectiveness of using contextual information for accurate flood and landslide detection.
Machine learning is a prevalent approach to tame the complexity of design space exploration for domain-specific architectures. Using ML for design space exploration poses challenges. First, it's not straightforward to identify the suitable algorithm from an increasing pool of ML methods. Second, assessing the trade-offs between performance and sample efficiency across these methods is inconclusive. Finally, lack of a holistic framework for fair, reproducible, and objective comparison across these methods hinders progress of adopting ML-aided architecture design space exploration and impedes creating repeatable artifacts. To mitigate these challenges, we introduce ArchGym, an open-source gym and easy-to-extend framework that connects diverse search algorithms to architecture simulators. To demonstrate utility, we evaluate ArchGym across multiple vanilla and domain-specific search algorithms in designing custom memory controller, deep neural network accelerators, and custom SoC for AR/VR workloads, encompassing over 21K experiments. Results suggest that with unlimited samples, ML algorithms are equally favorable to meet user-defined target specification if hyperparameters are tuned; no solution is necessarily better than another (e.g., reinforcement learning vs. Bayesian methods). We coin the term hyperparameter lottery to describe the chance for a search algorithm to find an optimal design provided meticulously selected hyperparameters. The ease of data collection and aggregation in ArchGym facilitates research in ML-aided architecture design space exploration. As a case study, we show this advantage by developing a proxy cost model with an RMSE of 0.61% that offers a 2,000-fold reduction in simulation time. Code and data for ArchGym is available at //bit.ly/ArchGym.
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.
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.
We introduce an effective model to overcome the problem of mode collapse when training Generative Adversarial Networks (GAN). Firstly, we propose a new generator objective that finds it better to tackle mode collapse. And, we apply an independent Autoencoders (AE) to constrain the generator and consider its reconstructed samples as "real" samples to slow down the convergence of discriminator that enables to reduce the gradient vanishing problem and stabilize the model. Secondly, from mappings between latent and data spaces provided by AE, we further regularize AE by the relative distance between the latent and data samples to explicitly prevent the generator falling into mode collapse setting. This idea comes when we find a new way to visualize the mode collapse on MNIST dataset. To the best of our knowledge, our method is the first to propose and apply successfully the relative distance of latent and data samples for stabilizing GAN. Thirdly, our proposed model, namely Generative Adversarial Autoencoder Networks (GAAN), is stable and has suffered from neither gradient vanishing nor mode collapse issues, as empirically demonstrated on synthetic, MNIST, MNIST-1K, CelebA and CIFAR-10 datasets. Experimental results show that our method can approximate well multi-modal distribution and achieve better results than state-of-the-art methods on these benchmark datasets. Our model implementation is published here: //github.com/tntrung/gaan
Automatically creating the description of an image using any natural languages sentence like English is a very challenging task. It requires expertise of both image processing as well as natural language processing. This paper discuss about different available models for image captioning task. We have also discussed about how the advancement in the task of object recognition and machine translation has greatly improved the performance of image captioning model in recent years. In addition to that we have discussed how this model can be implemented. In the end, we have also evaluated the performance of model using standard evaluation matrices.