In the past decade, many architectures of convolution neural networks were designed by handcraft, such as Vgg16, ResNet, DenseNet, etc. They all achieve state-of-the-art level on different tasks in their time. However, it still relies on human intuition and experience, and it also takes so much time consumption for trial and error. Neural Architecture Search (NAS) focused on this issue. In recent works, the Neural Predictor has significantly improved with few training architectures as training samples. However, the sampling efficiency is already considerable. In this paper, our proposed Siamese-Predictor is inspired by past works of predictor-based NAS. It is constructed with the proposed Estimation Code, which is the prior knowledge about the training procedure. The proposed Siamese-Predictor gets significant benefits from this idea. This idea causes it to surpass the current SOTA predictor on NASBench-201. In order to explore the impact of the Estimation Code, we analyze the relationship between it and accuracy. We also propose the search space Tiny-NanoBench for lightweight CNN architecture. This well-designed search space is easier to find better architecture with few FLOPs than NASBench-201. In summary, the proposed Siamese-Predictor is a predictor-based NAS. It achieves the SOTA level, especially with limited computation budgets. It applied to the proposed Tiny-NanoBench can just use a few trained samples to find extremely lightweight CNN architecture.
IBISC Université Paris-Saclay, Univ Evry（巴黎萨克雷大学埃夫里大学IBISC实验室）；MRL Massachusetts Institute of Technology（麻省理工学院MRL实验室）
Siamese networks are one of the most trending methods to achieve self-supervised visual representation learning (SSL). Since hand labeling is costly, SSL can play a crucial part by allowing deep learning to train on large unlabeled datasets. Meanwhile, Neural Architecture Search (NAS) is becoming increasingly important as a technique to discover novel deep learning architectures. However, early NAS methods based on reinforcement learning or evolutionary algorithms suffered from ludicrous computational and memory costs. In contrast, differentiable NAS, a gradient-based approach, has the advanta…
The University of Hong Kong（香港大学）；Bytedance Inc.（字节跳动公司）
High-resolution representations (HR) are essential for dense prediction tasks such as segmentation, detection, and pose estimation. Learning HR representations is typically ignored in previous Neural Architecture Search (NAS) methods that focus on image classification. This work proposes a novel NAS method, called HR-NAS, which is able to find efficient and accurate networks for different tasks, by effectively encoding multiscale contextual information while maintaining high-resolution representations. In HR-NAS, we renovate the NAS search space as well as its searching strategy. To better enc…
Accurate and fine-grained information about the extent of damage to buildings is essential for humanitarian relief and disaster response. However, as the most commonly used architecture in remote sensing interpretation tasks, Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) have limited ability to model the non-local relationship between pixels. Recently, Transformer architecture first proposed for modeling long-range dependency in natural language processing has shown promising results in computer vision tasks. Considering the frontier advances of Transformer architecture in the computer vision field, in…
Benefiting from the search efficiency, differentiable neural architecture search (NAS) has evolved as the most dominant alternative to automatically design competitive deep neural networks (DNNs). We note that DNNs must be executed under strictly hard performance constraints in real-world scenarios, for example, the runtime latency on autonomous vehicles. However, to obtain the architecture that meets the given performance constraint, previous hardware-aware differentiable NAS methods have to repeat a plethora of search runs to manually tune the hyper-parameters by trial and error, and thus th…
Samsung AI Center, Cambridge（三星剑桥人工智能中心）；University of Cambridge（剑桥大学）
Neural Architecture Search (NAS) is quickly becoming the standard methodology to design neural network models. However, NAS is typically compute-intensive because multiple models need to be evaluated before choosing the best one. To reduce the computational power and time needed, a proxy task is often used for evaluating each model instead of full training. In this paper, we evaluate conventional reduced-training proxies and quantify how well they preserve ranking between multiple models during search when compared with the rankings produced by final trained accuracy. We propose a series of ze…
Ukrainian Catholic University（乌克兰天主教大学）；Piñata Farms（Piñata农场）；CTU in Prague（布拉格捷克理工大学）
We present FEAR, a family of fast, efficient, accurate, and robust Siamese visual trackers. We present a novel and efficient way to benefit from dual-template representation for object model adaption, which incorporates temporal information with only a single learnable parameter. We further improve the tracker architecture with a pixel-wise fusion block. By plugging-in sophisticated backbones with the abovementioned modules, FEAR-M and FEAR-L trackers surpass most Siamese trackers on several academic benchmarks in both accuracy and efficiency. Employed with the lightweight backbone, the optimi…
University of Oulu（奥卢大学）；Czech Technical University（捷克理工大学）；Tampere University（坦佩雷大学）
This paper presents a novel neural architecture search method, called LiDNAS, for generating lightweight monocular depth estimation models. Unlike previous neural architecture search (NAS) approaches, where finding optimized networks are computationally highly demanding, the introduced novel Assisted Tabu Search leads to efficient architecture exploration. Moreover, we construct the search space on a pre-defined backbone network to balance layer diversity and search space size. The LiDNAS method outperforms the state-of-the-art NAS approach, proposed for disparity and depth estimation, in term…
University of Oulu（奥卢大学）；Tampere University（坦佩雷大学）；Czech Technical University（捷克技术大学）
We present LDP, a lightweight dense prediction neural architecture search (NAS) framework. Starting from a pre-defined generic backbone, LDP applies the novel Assisted Tabu Search for efficient architecture exploration. LDP is fast and suitable for various dense estimation problems, unlike previous NAS methods that are either computational demanding or deployed only for a single subtask. The performance of LPD is evaluated on monocular depth estimation, semantic segmentation, and image super-resolution tasks on diverse datasets, including NYU-Depth-v2, KITTI, Cityscapes, COCO-stuff, DIV2K, Set…
Harbin Institute of Technology（哈尔滨工业大学）；Peng Cheng Laboratory（鹏城实验室）
The search space of neural architecture search (NAS) for convolutional neural network (CNN) is huge. To reduce searching cost, most NAS algorithms use fixed outer network level structure, and search the repeatable cell structure only. Such kind of fixed architecture performs well when enough cells and channels are used. However, when the architecture becomes more lightweight, the performance decreases significantly. To obtain better lightweight architectures, more flexible and diversified neural architectures are in demand, and more efficient methods should be designed for larger search space.…
Politecnico di Torino（都灵理工大学）；University of Bologna（博洛尼亚大学）；ETH Zurich（苏黎世联邦理工学院）
Neural Architecture Search (NAS) is quickly becoming the go-to approach to optimize the structure of Deep Learning (DL) models for complex tasks such as Image Classification or Object Detection. However, many other relevant applications of DL, especially at the edge, are based on time-series processing and require models with unique features, for which NAS is less explored. This work focuses in particular on Temporal Convolutional Networks (TCNs), a convolutional model for time-series processing that has recently emerged as a promising alternative to more complex recurrent architectures. We pr…
Tencent（腾讯）；JD Explore Academy（京东探索研究院）；University of Southern California（南加州大学）；Xidian University（西安电子科技大学）
Single Image Super-Resolution (SISR) tasks have achieved significant performance with deep neural networks. However, the large number of parameters in CNN-based met-hods for SISR tasks require heavy computations. Although several efficient SISR models have been recently proposed, most are handcrafted and thus lack flexibility. In this work, we propose a novel differentiable Neural Architecture Search (NAS) approach on both the cell-level and network-level to search for lightweight SISR models. Specifically, the cell-level search space is designed based on an information distillation mechanism,…
The algorithms of one-shot neural architecture search(NAS) have been widely used to reduce computation consumption. However, because of the interference among the subnets in which weights are shared, the subnets inherited from these super-net trained by those algorithms have poor consistency in precision ranking. To address this problem, we propose a step-by-step training super-net scheme from one-shot NAS to few-shot NAS. In the training scheme, we firstly train super-net in a one-shot way, and then we disentangle the weights of super-net by splitting them into multi-subnets and training them…
Sabaragamuwa University of Sri Lanka（斯里兰卡萨伯勒格穆沃大学）
Automatic tomato disease recognition from leaf images is vital to avoid crop losses by applying control measures on time. Even though recent deep learning-based tomato disease recognition methods with classical training procedures showed promising recognition results, they demand large labelled data and involve expensive training. The traditional deep learning models proposed for tomato disease recognition also consume high memory and storage because of a high number of parameters. While lightweight networks overcome some of these issues to a certain extent, they continue to show low performan…
Road Traffic Sign Recognition method using Siamese network Combining Efficient-CNN based Encoder
School of Electronic and Electrical Engineering, Shanghai University of Engineering Science（上海工程技术大学电子与电气工程学院）；Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院自动化研究所）
College of Computer Science, Zhejiang University（浙江大学计算机学院）；College of Computer Science and Technology, Zhejiang University（浙江大学计算机科学与技术学院）；Shanghai Institute for Advanced Study, Zhejiang University（浙江大学上海高等研究院）
As an important and challenging problem, multi-domain learning (MDL) typically seeks for a set of effective lightweight domain-specific adapter modules plugged into a common domain-agnostic network. Usually, existing ways of adapter plugging and structure design are handcrafted and fixed for all domains before model learning, resulting in the learning inflexibility and computational intensiveness. With this motivation, we propose to learn a data-driven adapter plugging strategy with Neural Architecture Search (NAS), which automatically determines where to plug for those adapter modules. Furthe…
Meituan（美团）；Tencent（腾讯）；Bigo Technology（Bigo科技）；Alibaba Group（阿里巴巴集团）；Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院）
It is of great significance to estimate the performance of a given model architecture without training in the application of Neural Architecture Search (NAS) as it may take a lot of time to evaluate the performance of an architecture. In this paper, a novel NAS framework called GP-NAS-ensemble is proposed to predict the performance of a neural network architecture with a small training dataset. We make several improvements on the GP-NAS model to make it share the advantage of ensemble learning methods. Our method ranks second in the CVPR2022 second lightweight NAS challenge performance predict…
Hong Kong Baptist University（香港浸会大学）；Shanghai Jiao Tong University（上海交通大学）；Shanghai AI Laboratory（上海人工智能实验室）；NVIDIA AI Tech Center（英伟达人工智能技术中心）；The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (Guangzhou)（香港科技大学（广州））；Mahindra University（马恒达大学）；Coventry University（考文垂大学）
One-shot neural architecture search (NAS) substantially improves the search efficiency by training one supernet to estimate the performance of every possible child architecture (i.e., subnet). However, the inconsistency of characteristics among subnets incurs serious interference in the optimization, resulting in poor performance ranking correlation of subnets. Subsequent explorations decompose supernet weights via a particular criterion, e.g., gradient matching, to reduce the interference; yet they suffer from huge computational cost and low space separability. In this work, we propose a ligh…
The recent progress of deep convolutional neural networks has enabled great success in single image super-resolution (SISR) and many other vision tasks. Their performances are also being increased by deepening the networks and developing more sophisticated network structures. However, finding an optimal structure for the given problem is a difficult task, even for human experts. For this reason, neural architecture search (NAS) methods have been introduced, which automate the procedure of constructing the structures. In this paper, we expand the NAS to the super-resolution domain and find a li…
Land-cover classification has long been a hot and difficult challenge in remote sensing community. With massive High-resolution Remote Sensing (HRS) images available, manually and automatically designed Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) have already shown their great latent capacity on HRS land-cover classification in recent years. Especially, the former can achieve better performance while the latter is able to generate lightweight architecture. Unfortunately, they both have shortcomings. On the one hand, because manual CNNs are almost proposed for natural image processing, it becomes very…
University of Science and Technology of China（中国科学技术大学）；Microsoft Research Asia（微软亚洲研究院）；Microsoft Azure Speech（微软Azure语音）
Text to speech (TTS) has been broadly used to synthesize natural and intelligible speech in different scenarios. Deploying TTS in various end devices such as mobile phones or embedded devices requires extremely small memory usage and inference latency. While non-autoregressive TTS models such as FastSpeech have achieved significantly faster inference speed than autoregressive models, their model size and inference latency are still large for the deployment in resource constrained devices. In this paper, we propose LightSpeech, which leverages neural architecture search~(NAS) to automatically d…
The fundamental problem in Neural Architecture Search (NAS) is to efficiently find high-performing architectures from a given search space. We propose a simple but powerful method which we call FEAR, for ranking architectures in any search space. FEAR leverages the viewpoint that neural networks are powerful non-linear feature extractors. First, we train different architectures in the search space to the same training or validation error. Then, we compare the usefulness of the features extracted by each architecture. We do so with a quick training keeping most of the architecture frozen. This …
Northwest University（西北大学）；Monash University（莫纳什大学）；Shandong Artificial Intelligence Institute, Qilu University of Technology（齐鲁工业大学山东省人工智能研究院）
In the field of complex action recognition in videos, the quality of the designed model plays a crucial role in the final performance. However, artificially designed network structures often rely heavily on the researchers' knowledge and experience. Accordingly, because of the automated design of its network structure, Neural architecture search (NAS) has achieved great success in the image processing field and attracted substantial research attention in recent years. Although some NAS methods have reduced the number of GPU search days required to single digits in the image field, directly usi…
Universidade da Beira Interior（贝拉内政大学）；Huawei Noah’s Ark Lab（华为诺亚方舟实验室）；University College London（伦敦大学学院）
The Neural Architecture Search (NAS) problem is typically formulated as a graph search problem where the goal is to learn the optimal operations over edges in order to maximise a graph-level global objective. Due to the large architecture parameter space, efficiency is a key bottleneck preventing NAS from its practical use. In this paper, we address the issue by framing NAS as a multi-agent problem where agents control a subset of the network and coordinate to reach optimal architectures. We provide two distinct lightweight implementations, with reduced memory requirements (1/8th of state-of-t…
Different from handcrafted features, deep neural networks can automatically learn task-specific features from data. Due to this data-driven nature, they have achieved remarkable success in various areas. However, manual design and selection of suitable network architectures are time-consuming and require substantial effort of human experts. To address this problem, researchers have proposed neural architecture search (NAS) algorithms which can automatically generate network architectures but suffer from heavy computational cost and instability if searching from scratch. In this paper, we propo…
Hikvision Research Institute（海康威视研究院）；Zhejiang University（浙江大学）；University of Science and Technology of China（中国科学技术大学）
Accuracy predictor is trained to predict the validation accuracy of an network from its architecture encoding. It can effectively assist in designing networks and improving Neural Architecture Search(NAS) efficiency. However, a high-performance predictor depends on adequate trainning samples, which requires unaffordable computation overhead. To alleviate this problem, we propose a novel framework to train an accuracy predictor under few training samples. The framework consists ofdata augmentation methods and an ensemble learning algorithm. The data augmentation methods calibrate weak labels an…
Neural Architecture Search (NAS) is a collection of methods to craft the way neural networks are built. We apply this idea to Federated Learning (FL), wherein predefined neural network models are trained on the client/device data. This approach is not optimal as the model developers can't observe the local data, and hence, are unable to build highly accurate and efficient models. NAS is promising for FL which can search for global and personalized models automatically for the non-IID data. Most NAS methods are computationally expensive and require fine-tuning after the search, making it a two-…
Skin cancer is one of the deadly types of cancer and is common in the world. Recently, there has been a huge jump in the rate of people getting skin cancer. For this reason, the number of studies on skin cancer classification with deep learning are increasing day by day. For the growth of work in this area, the International Skin Imaging Collaboration (ISIC) organization was established and they created an open dataset archive. In this study, images were taken from ISIC 2017 Challenge. The skin cancer images taken were preprocessed and data augmented. Later, these images were trained with tran…
Unsupervised Domain Adaptation Architecture Search with Self-Training for Land Cover Mapping
RIKEN Center for Advanced Intelligence Project (AIP), RIKEN（理化学研究所先进智能中心（AIP））；Graduate School of Frontier Sciences, The University of Tokyo（东京大学前沿科学研究院）
Fraunhofer Institute for Computer Graphics Research IGD（弗劳恩霍夫计算机图形研究所）；Mathematical and Applied Visual Computing, TU Darmstadt（达姆施塔特工业大学数学与应用视觉计算）
Deep neural networks have rapidly become the mainstream method for face recognition (FR). However, this limits the deployment of such models that contain an extremely large number of parameters to embedded and low-end devices. In this work, we present an extremely lightweight and accurate FR solution, namely PocketNet. We utilize neural architecture search to develop a new family of lightweight face-specific architectures. We additionally propose a novel training paradigm based on knowledge distillation (KD), the multi-step KD, where the knowledge is distilled from the teacher model to the stu…
National University of Defense Technology（国防科技大学）；Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院）；Fujian Normal University（福建师范大学）；Jimei University（集美大学）
Neural architecture search methods seek optimal candidates with efficient weight-sharing supernet training. However, recent studies indicate poor ranking consistency about the performance between stand-alone architectures and shared-weight networks. In this paper, we present Prior-Guided One-shot NAS (PGONAS) to strengthen the ranking correlation of supernets. Specifically, we first explore the effect of activation functions and propose a balanced sampling strategy based on the Sandwich Rule to alleviate weight coupling in the supernet. Then, FLOPs and Zen-Score are adopted to guide the traini…
Tsinghua University（清华大学）；University of Science and Technology of China（中国科学技术大学）；Nanjing University of Science and Technology（南京理工大学）；Microsoft Research Asia（微软亚洲研究院）
While pre-trained language models (e.g., BERT) have achieved impressive results on different natural language processing tasks, they have large numbers of parameters and suffer from big computational and memory costs, which make them difficult for real-world deployment. Therefore, model compression is necessary to reduce the computation and memory cost of pre-trained models. In this work, we aim to compress BERT and address the following two challenging practical issues: (1) The compression algorithm should be able to output multiple compressed models with different sizes and latencies, in ord…
Hikvision Research Institute（海康威视研究院）；Zhejiang University（浙江大学）；University of Science and Technology of China（中国科学技术大学）
One-shot neural architecture search (NAS) applies weight-sharing supernet to reduce the unaffordable computation overhead of automated architecture designing. However, the weight-sharing technique worsens the ranking consistency of performance due to the interferences between different candidate networks. To address this issue, we propose a candidates enhancement method and progressive training pipeline to improve the ranking correlation of supernet. Specifically, we carefully redesign the sub-networks in the supernet and map the original supernet to a new one of high capacity. In addition, we…
Multiplication-less neural networks significantly reduce the time and energy cost on the hardware platform, as the compute-intensive multiplications are replaced with lightweight bit-shift operations. However, existing bit-shift networks are all directly transferred from state-of-the-art convolutional neural networks (CNNs), which lead to non-negligible accuracy drop or even failure of model convergence. To combat this, we propose ShiftNAS, the first framework tailoring Neural Architecture Search (NAS) to substantially reduce the accuracy gap between bit-shift neural networks and their real-va…
Nagoya University（名古屋大学）；Navier, Inc.（Navier公司）；The University of Tokyo（东京大学）；Ritsumeikan University（立命馆大学）；Hitotsubashi University（一桥大学）
The number of traffic accidents has been continuously increasing in recent years worldwide. Many accidents are caused by distracted drivers, who take their attention away from driving. Motivated by the success of Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) in computer vision, many researchers developed CNN-based algorithms to recognize distracted driving from a dashcam and warn the driver against unsafe behaviors. However, current models have too many parameters, which is unfeasible for vehicle-mounted computing. This work proposes a novel knowledge-distillation-based framework to solve this problem.…
By the widespread popularity of electronic devices, the emergence of biometric technology has brought significant convenience to user authentication compared with the traditional password and mode unlocking. Among many biological characteristics, the face is a universal and irreplaceable feature that does not need too much cooperation and can significantly improve the user's experience at the same time. Face recognition is one of the main functions of electronic equipment propaganda. Hence it's virtually worth researching in computer vision. Previous work in this field has focused on two direc…
Recently, FCNs have attracted widespread attention in the CD field. In pursuit of better CD performance, it has become a tendency to design deeper and more complicated FCNs, which inevitably brings about huge numbers of parameters and an unbearable computational burden. With the goal of designing a quite deep architecture to obtain more precise CD results while simultaneously decreasing parameter numbers to improve efficiency, in this work, we present a very deep and efficient CD network, entitled EffCDNet. In EffCDNet, to reduce the numerous parameters associated with deep architecture, an ef…
Recently, Neural architecture search has achieved great success on classification tasks for mobile devices. The backbone network for object detection is usually obtained on the image classification task. However, the architecture which is searched through the classification task is sub-optimal because of the gap between the task of image and object detection. As while work focuses on backbone network architecture search for mobile device object detection is limited, mainly because the backbone always requires expensive ImageNet pre-training. Accordingly, it is necessary to study the approach o…
Is Geometry Enough? An Evaluation of Landmark-Based Gaze Estimation
Department of Industrial Engineering and Mathematical Sciences, Università Politecnica delle Marche（工业工程与数学科学系，帕尔米塞大学）；Department of Science and Information Technology, Università Pegaso（科学与信息科技系，佩加索大学）
