In this paper, we explore the idea of weight sharing over multiple scales in convolutional networks. Inspired by traditional computer vision approaches, we share the weights of convolution kernels over different scales in the same layers of the network. Although multi-scale feature aggregation and sharing inside convolutional networks are common in practice, none of the previous works address the issue of convolutional weight sharing. We evaluate our weight sharing scheme on two heterogeneous image recognition datasets - ImageNet (object recognition) and Places365-Standard (scene classification). With approximately 25% fewer parameters, our shared-weight ResNet model provides similar performance compared to baseline ResNets. Shared-weight models are further validated via transfer learning experiments on four additional image recognition datasets - Caltech256 and Stanford 40 Actions (object-centric) and SUN397 and MIT Inddor67 (scene-centric). Experimental results demonstrate significant redundancy in the vanilla implementations of the deeper networks, and also indicate that a shift towards increasing the receptive field per parameter may improve future convolutional network architectures.
Multi-task learning is an effective learning strategy for deep-learning-based facial expression recognition tasks. However, most existing methods take into limited consideration the feature selection, when transferring information between different tasks, which may lead to task interference when training the multi-task networks. To address this problem, we propose a novel selective feature-sharing method, and establish a multi-task network for facial expression recognition and facial expression synthesis. The proposed method can effectively transfer beneficial features between different tasks,…
Tsinghua University（清华大学）；Beijing National Research Center for Information Science and Technology（北京信息科学与技术国家研究中心）
Learning to predict multiple attributes of a pedestrian is a multi-task learning problem. To share feature representation between two individual task networks, conventional methods like Cross-Stitch and Sluice network learn a linear combination of features or feature subspaces. However, linear combination rules out the complex interdependency between channels. Moreover, spatial information exchanging is less-considered. In this paper, we propose a novel Co-Attentive Sharing (CAS) module which extracts discriminative channels and spatial regions for more effective feature sharing in multi-task …
KTH Royal Institute of Technology（瑞典皇家理工学院）；Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences（瑞典农业科学大学）；University of California, Davis（加州大学戴维斯分校）；Univrses；Silo AI
Orthopedic disorders are common among horses, often leading to euthanasia, which often could have been avoided with earlier detection. These conditions often create varying degrees of subtle long-term pain. It is challenging to train a visual pain recognition method with video data depicting such pain, since the resulting pain behavior also is subtle, sparsely appearing, and varying, making it challenging for even an expert human labeller to provide accurate ground-truth for the data. We show that a model trained solely on a dataset of horses with acute experimental pain (where labeling is les…
Recent isotropic networks, such as ConvMixer and vision transformers, have found significant success across visual recognition tasks, matching or outperforming non-isotropic convolutional neural networks (CNNs). Isotropic architectures are particularly well-suited to cross-layer weight sharing, an effective neural network compression technique. In this paper, we perform an empirical evaluation on methods for sharing parameters in isotropic networks (SPIN). We present a framework to formalize major weight sharing design decisions and perform a comprehensive empirical evaluation of this design s…
High-performance visual recognition systems generally require a large collection of labeled images to train. The expensive data curation can be an obstacle for improving recognition performance. Sharing more data allows training for better models. But personal and private information in the data prevent such sharing. To promote sharing visual data for learning a recognition model, we propose to obfuscate the images so that humans are not able to recognize their detailed contents, while machines can still utilize them to train new models. We validate our approach by comprehensive experiments on…
Sun Yat-Sen University（中山大学）；National University of Singapore（新加坡国立大学）
This paper proposes a reconfigurable model to recognize and detect multiclass (or multiview) objects with large variation in appearance. Compared with well acknowledged hierarchical models, we study two advanced capabilities in hierarchy for object modeling: (i) "switch" variables(i.e. or-nodes) for specifying alternative compositions, and (ii) making local classifiers (i.e. leaf-nodes) shared among different classes. These capabilities enable us to account well for structural variabilities while preserving the model compact. Our model, in the form of an And-Or Graph, comprises four layers: a …
The University of Sydney（悉尼大学）；SenseTime Research（商汤科技研究院）；Institute for Artificial Intelligence, Tsinghua University（清华大学人工智能研究院）
Searching for network width is an effective way to slim deep neural networks with hardware budgets. With this aim, a one-shot supernet is usually leveraged as a performance evaluator to rank the performance \wrt~different width. Nevertheless, current methods mainly follow a manually fixed weight sharing pattern, which is limited to distinguish the performance gap of different width. In this paper, to better evaluate each width, we propose a locally free weight sharing strategy (CafeNet) accordingly. In CafeNet, weights are more freely shared, and each width is jointly indicated by its base cha…
South China University of Technology（华南理工大学）；Tencent AI Lab（腾讯人工智能实验室）；University of Texas at Arlington（德克萨斯大学阿灵顿分校）
Neural architecture search (NAS) has gained increasing attention in the community of architecture design. One of the key factors behind the success lies in the training efficiency created by the weight sharing (WS) technique. However, WS-based NAS methods often suffer from a performance disturbance (PD) issue. That is, the training of subsequent architectures inevitably disturbs the performance of previously trained architectures due to the partially shared weights. This leads to inaccurate performance estimation for the previous architectures, which makes it hard to learn a good search strate…
In this paper, we propose the differentiable channel sparsity search (DCSS) for convolutional neural networks. Unlike traditional channel pruning algorithms which require users to manually set prune ratios for each convolutional layer, DCSS automatically searches the optimal combination of sparsities. Inspired by the differentiable architecture search (DARTS), we draw lessons from the continuous relaxation and leverage the gradient information to balance the computational cost and metrics. Since directly applying the scheme of DARTS causes shape mismatching and excessive memory consumption, we…
Massachusetts Institute of Technology（麻省理工学院）；University of Leeds（利兹大学）；University of Liverpool（利物浦大学）
Vision and touch are two of the important sensing modalities for humans and they offer complementary information for sensing the environment. Robots could also benefit from such multi-modal sensing ability. In this paper, addressing for the first time (to the best of our knowledge) texture recognition from tactile images and vision, we propose a new fusion method named Deep Maximum Covariance Analysis (DMCA) to learn a joint latent space for sharing features through vision and tactile sensing. The features of camera images and tactile data acquired from a GelSight sensor are learned by deep ne…
Huawei（华为）；Samsung Research China, Beijing（三星中国研究院（北京））
Weight sharing based and predictor based methods are two major types of fast neural architecture search methods. In this paper, we propose to jointly use weight sharing and predictor in a unified framework. First, we construct a SuperNet in a weight-sharing way and probabilisticly sample architectures from the SuperNet. To increase the correctness of the evaluation of architectures, besides direct evaluation using the inherited weights, we further apply a few-shot predictor to assess the architecture on the other hand. The final evaluation of the architecture is the combination of direct evalu…
With the success of deep neural networks, Neural Architecture Search (NAS) as a way of automatic model design has attracted wide attention. As training every child model from scratch is very time-consuming, recent works leverage weight-sharing to speed up the model evaluation procedure. These approaches greatly reduce computation by maintaining a single copy of weights on the super-net and share the weights among every child model. However, weight-sharing has no theoretical guarantee and its impact has not been well studied before. In this paper, we conduct comprehensive experiments to reveal …
Computer Vision Laboratory, École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne（洛桑联邦理工学院计算机视觉实验室）
The performance of a classifier trained on data coming from a specific domain typically degrades when applied to a related but different one. While annotating many samples from the new domain would address this issue, it is often too expensive or impractical. Domain Adaptation has therefore emerged as a solution to this problem; It leverages annotated data from a source domain, in which it is abundant, to train a classifier to operate in a target domain, in which it is either sparse or even lacking altogether. In this context, the recent trend consists of learning deep architectures whose weig…
Federal Research Center “Computer Science and Control” of Russian Academy of Sciences（俄罗斯科学院计算机科学与控制联邦研究中心）；Smart Engines Service LLC；Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology “MIPT”（莫斯科物理技术学院（MIPT））
Due to a noticeable expansion of document recognition applicability, there is a high demand for recognition on mobile devices. A mobile camera, unlike a scanner, cannot always ensure the absence of various image distortions, therefore the task of improving the recognition precision is relevant. The advantage of mobile devices over scanners is the ability to use video stream input, which allows to get multiple images of a recognized document. Despite this, not enough attention is currently paid to the issue of combining recognition results obtained from different frames when using video stream …
The global Information and Communications Technology (ICT) supply chain is a complex network consisting of all types of participants. It is often formulated as a Social Network to discuss the supply chain network's relations, properties, and development in supply chain management. Information sharing plays a crucial role in improving the efficiency of the supply chain, and datasheets are the most common data format to describe e-component commodities in the ICT supply chain because of human readability. However, with the surging number of electronic documents, it has been far beyond the capaci…
In this paper, we propose a real-time and accurate automatic license plate recognition (ALPR) approach. Our study illustrates the outstanding design of ALPR with four insights: (1) the resampling-based cascaded framework is beneficial to both speed and accuracy; (2) the highly efficient license plate recognition should abundant additional character segmentation and recurrent neural network (RNN), but adopt a plain convolutional neural network (CNN); (3) in the case of CNN, taking advantage of vertex information on license plates improves the recognition performance; and (4) the weight-sharing …
Northwestern Polytechnical University（西北工业大学）；The University of Adelaide（阿德莱德大学）
Different from RGB videos, depth data in RGB-D videos provide key complementary information for tristimulus visual data which potentially could achieve accuracy improvement for action recognition. However, most of the existing action recognition models solely using RGB videos limit the performance capacity. Additionally, the state-of-the-art action recognition models, namely 3D convolutional neural networks (3D-CNNs) contain tremendous parameters suffering from computational inefficiency. In this paper, we propose a series of 3D light-weight architectures for action recognition based on RGB-D …
U.S. Army Research Laboratory（美国陆军研究实验室）；University of Maryland（马里兰大学）；Booz Allen Hamilton Inc.（博思艾伦汉密尔顿公司）
Many previous methods have showed the importance of considering semantically relevant objects for performing event recognition, yet none of the methods have exploited the power of deep convolutional neural networks to directly integrate relevant object information into a unified network. We present a novel unified deep CNN architecture which integrates architecturally different, yet semantically-related object detection networks to enhance the performance of the event recognition task. Our architecture allows the sharing of the convolutional layers and a fully connected layer which effectively…
Weight sharing, as an approach to speed up architecture performance estimation has received wide attention. Instead of training each architecture separately, weight sharing builds a supernet that assembles all the architectures as its submodels. However, there has been debate over whether the NAS process actually benefits from weight sharing, due to the gap between supernet optimization and the objective of NAS. To further understand the effect of weight sharing on NAS, we conduct a comprehensive analysis on five search spaces, including NAS-Bench-101, NAS-Bench-201, DARTS-CIFAR10, DARTS-PTB, …
In this paper, we propose an efficient algorithm for robust place recognition and loop detection using camera information only. Our pipeline purely relies on spatial localization and semantic information of road markings. The creation of the database of road markings sequences is performed online, which makes the method applicable for real-time loop closure for visual SLAM techniques. Furthermore, our algorithm is robust to various weather conditions, occlusions from vehicles, and shadows. We have performed an extensive number of experiments which highlight the effectiveness and scalability of…
Collaborative Representation Classification (CRC) for face recognition attracts a lot attention recently due to its good recognition performance and fast speed. Compared to Sparse Representation Classification (SRC), CRC achieves a comparable recognition performance with 10-1000 times faster speed. In this paper, we propose to ensemble several CRC models to promote the recognition rate, where each CRC model uses different and divergent randomly generated biologically-inspired features as the face representation. The proposed ensemble algorithm calculates an ensemble weight for each CRC model t…
Research in human action recognition has accelerated significantly since the introduction of powerful machine learning tools such as Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs). However, effective and efficient methods for incorporation of temporal information into CNNs are still being actively explored in the recent literature. Motivated by the popular recurrent attention models in the research area of natural language processing, we propose the Attention-based Temporal Weighted CNN (ATW), which embeds a visual attention model into a temporal weighted multi-stream CNN. This attention model is simply…
Beihang University（北京航空航天大学）；Inception Institute of Artificial Intelligence（Inception人工智能研究院）；Guangdong University of Petrochemical Technology（广东石油化工学院）
In this paper, we present a two-stream multi-task network for fashion recognition. This task is challenging as fashion clothing always contain multiple attributes, which need to be predicted simultaneously for real-time industrial systems. To handle these challenges, we formulate fashion recognition into a multi-task learning problem, including landmark detection, category and attribute classifications, and solve it with the proposed deep convolutional neural network. We design two knowledge sharing strategies which enable information transfer between tasks and improve the overall performance.…
In the real open world, data tends to follow long-tailed class distributions, motivating the well-studied long-tailed recognition (LTR) problem. Naive training produces models that are biased toward common classes in terms of higher accuracy. The key to addressing LTR is to balance various aspects including data distribution, training losses, and gradients in learning. We explore an orthogonal direction, weight balancing, motivated by the empirical observation that the naively trained classifier has "artificially" larger weights in norm for common classes (because there exists abundant data to…
DNN-based face recognition models require large centrally aggregated face datasets for training. However, due to the growing data privacy concerns and legal restrictions, accessing and sharing face datasets has become exceedingly difficult. We propose FedFace, a federated learning (FL) framework for collaborative learning of face recognition models in a privacy-aware manner. FedFace utilizes the face images available on multiple clients to learn an accurate and generalizable face recognition model where the face images stored at each client are neither shared with other clients nor the central…
In recent years, deep neural networks have achieved high ac-curacy in the field of image recognition. By inspired from human learning method, we propose a semantic segmentation method using cooperative learning which shares the information resembling a group learning. We use two same networks and paths for sending feature maps between two networks. Two networks are trained simultaneously. By sharing feature maps, one of two networks can obtain the information that cannot be obtained by a single network. In addition, in order to enhance the degree of cooperation, we propose two kinds of methods…
The University of Sydney（悉尼大学）；SenseTime Research（商汤科技研究院）；Tsinghua University（清华大学）
In one-shot weight sharing for NAS, the weights of each operation (at each layer) are supposed to be identical for all architectures (paths) in the supernet. However, this rules out the possibility of adjusting operation weights to cater for different paths, which limits the reliability of the evaluation results. In this paper, instead of counting on a single supernet, we introduce $K$-shot supernets and take their weights for each operation as a dictionary. The operation weight for each path is represented as a convex combination of items in a dictionary with a simplex code. This enables a ma…
Weight sharing promises to make neural architecture search (NAS) tractable even on commodity hardware. Existing methods in this space rely on a diverse set of heuristics to design and train the shared-weight backbone network, a.k.a. the super-net. Since heuristics and hyperparameters substantially vary across different methods, a fair comparison between them can only be achieved by systematically analyzing the influence of these factors. In this paper, we therefore provide a systematic evaluation of the heuristics and hyperparameters that are frequently employed by weight-sharing NAS algorithm…
Gleamer（Gleamer公司）；Sorbonne Université（索邦大学）；CNRS（法国国家科学研究中心）；Institut des Systèmes Intelligents et de Robotique（智能系统与机器人研究所）
Weight-sharing (WS) has recently emerged as a paradigm to accelerate the automated search for efficient neural architectures, a process dubbed Neural Architecture Search (NAS). Although very appealing, this framework is not without drawbacks and several works have started to question its capabilities on small hand-crafted benchmarks. In this paper, we take advantage of the \nasbench dataset to challenge the efficiency of WS on a representative search space. By comparing a SOTA WS approach to a plain random search we show that, despite decent correlations between evaluations using weight-sharin…
We propose a simple and generic layer formulation that extends the properties of convolutional layers to any domain that can be described by a graph. Namely, we use the support of its adjacency matrix to design learnable weight sharing filters able to exploit the underlying structure of signals in the same fashion as for images. The proposed formulation makes it possible to learn the weights of the filter as well as a scheme that controls how they are shared across the graph. We perform validation experiments with image datasets and show that these filters offer performances comparable with co…
Huawei Inc.（华为公司）；Shanghai Jiao Tong University（上海交通大学）；Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications（北京邮电大学）
Neural architecture search (NAS) has attracted increasing attentions in both academia and industry. In the early age, researchers mostly applied individual search methods which sample and evaluate the candidate architectures separately and thus incur heavy computational overheads. To alleviate the burden, weight-sharing methods were proposed in which exponentially many architectures share weights in the same super-network, and the costly training procedure is performed only once. These methods, though being much faster, often suffer the issue of instability. This paper provides a literature re…
Deep convolutional neural networks (ConvNets) have been recently shown to attain state-of-the-art performance for action recognition on standard-resolution videos. However, less attention has been paid to recognition performance at extremely low resolutions (eLR) (e.g., 16 x 12 pixels). Reliable action recognition using eLR cameras would address privacy concerns in various application environments such as private homes, hospitals, nursing/rehabilitation facilities, etc. In this paper, we propose a semi-coupled filter-sharing network that leverages high resolution (HR) videos during training in…
University of Louisiana at Lafayette（路易斯安那大学拉斐特分校）
In recent years, hypercomplex-inspired neural networks (HCNNs) have been used to improve deep learning architectures due to their ability to enable channel-based weight sharing, treat colors as a single entity, and improve representational coherence within the layers. The work described herein studies the effect of replacing existing layers in an Axial Attention network with their representationally coherent variants to assess the effect on image classification. We experiment with the stem of the network, the bottleneck layers, and the fully connected backend, by replacing them with representa…
Scaled dot-product attention applies a softmax function on the scaled dot-product of queries and keys to calculate weights and then multiplies the weights and values. In this work, we study how to improve the learning of scaled dot-product attention to improve the accuracy of DETR. Our method is based on the following observations: using ground truth foreground-background mask (GT Fg-Bg Mask) as additional cues in the weights/values learning enables learning much better weights/values; with better weights/values, better values/weights can be learned. We propose a triple-attention module in whi…
We present a framework for translating unlabeled images from one domain into analog images in another domain. We employ a progressively growing skip-connected encoder-generator structure and train it with a GAN loss for realistic output, a cycle consistency loss for maintaining same-domain translation identity, and a semantic consistency loss that encourages the network to keep the input semantic features in the output. We apply our framework on the task of translating face images, and show that it is capable of learning semantic mappings for face images with no supervised one-to-one image map…
Efficient Neural Architecture Search methods based on weight sharing have shown good promise in democratizing Neural Architecture Search for computer vision models. There is, however, an ongoing debate whether these efficient methods are significantly better than random search. Here we perform a thorough comparison between efficient and random search methods on a family of progressively larger and more challenging search spaces for image classification and detection on ImageNet and COCO. While the efficacies of both methods are problem-dependent, our experiments demonstrate that there are larg…
Deep Residual Networks have reached the state of the art in many image processing tasks such image classification. However, the cost for a gain in accuracy in terms of depth and memory is prohibitive as it requires a higher number of residual blocks, up to double the initial value. To tackle this problem, we propose in this paper a way to reduce the redundant information of the networks. We share the weights of convolutional layers between residual blocks operating at the same spatial scale. The signal flows multiple times in the same convolutional layer. The resulting architecture, called Sha…
One of the most critical problems in weight-sharing neural architecture search is the evaluation of candidate models within a predefined search space. In practice, a one-shot supernet is trained to serve as an evaluator. A faithful ranking certainly leads to more accurate searching results. However, current methods are prone to making misjudgments. In this paper, we prove that their biased evaluation is due to inherent unfairness in the supernet training. In view of this, we propose two levels of constraints: expectation fairness and strict fairness. Particularly, strict fairness ensures equal…
Ecole Centrale de Lyon（里昂中央理工学院）；Institut des Nanotechnologies de Lyon and CNRS（里昂纳米技术研究所及法国国家科学研究中心）
The computational workload involved in Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) is typically out of reach for low-power embedded devices. There are a large number of approximation techniques to address this problem. These methods have hyper-parameters that need to be optimized for each CNNs using design space exploration (DSE). The goal of this work is to demonstrate that the DSE phase time can easily explode for state of the art CNN. We thus propose the use of an optimized exploration process to drastically reduce the exploration time without sacrificing the quality of the output.
Neural architecture search has attracted wide attentions in both academia and industry. To accelerate it, researchers proposed weight-sharing methods which first train a super-network to reuse computation among different operators, from which exponentially many sub-networks can be sampled and efficiently evaluated. These methods enjoy great advantages in terms of computational costs, but the sampled sub-networks are not guaranteed to be estimated precisely unless an individual training process is taken. This paper owes such inaccuracy to the inevitable mismatch between assembled network layers…
SenseTime Research（商汤科技研究院）；Beihang University（北京航空航天大学）；University of Sydney（悉尼大学）
The recent progress on automatically searching augmentation policies has boosted the performance substantially for various tasks. A key component of automatic augmentation search is the evaluation process for a particular augmentation policy, which is utilized to return reward and usually runs thousands of times. A plain evaluation process, which includes full model training and validation, would be time-consuming. To achieve efficiency, many choose to sacrifice evaluation reliability for speed. In this paper, we dive into the dynamics of augmented training of the model. This inspires us to de…
Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) are known to be significantly over-parametrized, and difficult to interpret, train and adapt. In this paper, we introduce a structural regularization across convolutional kernels in a CNN. In our approach, each convolution kernel is first decomposed as 2D dictionary atoms linearly combined by coefficients. The widely observed correlation and redundancy in a CNN hint a common low-rank structure among the decomposed coefficients, which is here further supported by our empirical observations. We then explicitly regularize CNN kernels by enforcing decomposed co…
Recent years have witnessed the increasing application of place recognition in various environments, such as city roads, large buildings, and a mix of indoor and outdoor places. This task, however, still remains challenging due to the limitations of different sensors and the changing appearance of environments. Current works only consider the use of individual sensors, or simply combine different sensors, ignoring the fact that the importance of different sensors varies as the environment changes. In this paper, an adaptive weighting visual-LiDAR fusion method, named AdaFusion, is proposed to …
The current trend of pushing CNNs deeper with convolutions has created a pressing demand to achieve higher compression gains on CNNs where convolutions dominate the computation and parameter amount (e.g., GoogLeNet, ResNet and Wide ResNet). Further, the high energy consumption of convolutions limits its deployment on mobile devices. To this end, we proposed a simple yet effective scheme for compressing convolutions though applying k-means clustering on the weights, compression is achieved through weight-sharing, by only recording $K$ cluster centers and weight assignment indexes. We then intro…
Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology（韩国科学技术院）
This paper proposes a new evaluation metric and boosting method for weight separability in neural network design. In contrast to general visual recognition methods designed to encourage both intra-class compactness and inter-class separability of latent features, we focus on estimating linear independence of column vectors in weight matrix and improving the separability of weight vectors. To this end, we propose an evaluation metric for weight separability based on semi-orthogonality of a matrix and Frobenius distance, and the feed-backward reconstruction loss which explicitly encourages weigh…
To discover powerful yet compact models is an important goal of neural architecture search. Previous two-stage one-shot approaches are limited by search space with a fixed depth. It seems handy to include an additional skip connection in the search space to make depths variable. However, it creates a large range of perturbation during supernet training and it has difficulty giving a confident ranking for subnetworks. In this paper, we discover that skip connections bring about significant feature inconsistency compared with other operations, which potentially degrades the supernet performance.…
