scholarly journals Sparsity-Inducing Binarized Neural Networks

2020 ◽  
Vol 34 (07) ◽  
pp. 12192-12199 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peisong Wang ◽  
Xiangyu He ◽  
Gang Li ◽  
Tianli Zhao ◽  
Jian Cheng

Binarization of feature representation is critical for Binarized Neural Networks (BNNs). Currently, sign function is the commonly used method for feature binarization. Although it works well on small datasets, the performance on ImageNet remains unsatisfied. Previous methods mainly focus on minimizing quantization error, improving the training strategies and decomposing each convolution layer into several binary convolution modules. However, whether sign is the only option for binarization has been largely overlooked. In this work, we propose the Sparsity-inducing Binarized Neural Network (Si-BNN), to quantize the activations to be either 0 or +1, which introduces sparsity into binary representation. We further introduce trainable thresholds into the backward function of binarization to guide the gradient propagation. Our method dramatically outperforms current state-of-the-arts, lowering the performance gap between full-precision networks and BNNs on mainstream architectures, achieving the new state-of-the-art on binarized AlexNet (Top-1 50.5%), ResNet-18 (Top-1 59.7%), and VGG-Net (Top-1 63.2%). At inference time, Si-BNN still enjoys the high efficiency of exclusive-not-or (xnor) operations.

Author(s):  
Weixiang Xu ◽  
Xiangyu He ◽  
Tianli Zhao ◽  
Qinghao Hu ◽  
Peisong Wang ◽  
...  

Large neural networks are difficult to deploy on mobile devices because of intensive computation and storage. To alleviate it, we study ternarization, a balance between efficiency and accuracy that quantizes both weights and activations into ternary values. In previous ternarized neural networks, a hard threshold Δ is introduced to determine quantization intervals. Although the selection of Δ greatly affects the training results, previous works estimate Δ via an approximation or treat it as a hyper-parameter, which is suboptimal. In this paper, we present the Soft Threshold Ternary Networks (STTN), which enables the model to automatically determine quantization intervals instead of depending on a hard threshold. Concretely, we replace the original ternary kernel with the addition of two binary kernels at training time, where ternary values are determined by the combination of two corresponding binary values. At inference time, we add up the two binary kernels to obtain a single ternary kernel. Our method dramatically outperforms current state-of-the-arts, lowering the performance gap between full-precision networks and extreme low bit networks. Experiments on ImageNet with AlexNet (Top-1 55.6%), ResNet-18 (Top-1 66.2%) achieves new state-of-the-art.


2020 ◽  
Vol 1 (6) ◽  
Author(s):  
Pablo Barros ◽  
Nikhil Churamani ◽  
Alessandra Sciutti

AbstractCurrent state-of-the-art models for automatic facial expression recognition (FER) are based on very deep neural networks that are effective but rather expensive to train. Given the dynamic conditions of FER, this characteristic hinders such models of been used as a general affect recognition. In this paper, we address this problem by formalizing the FaceChannel, a light-weight neural network that has much fewer parameters than common deep neural networks. We introduce an inhibitory layer that helps to shape the learning of facial features in the last layer of the network and, thus, improving performance while reducing the number of trainable parameters. To evaluate our model, we perform a series of experiments on different benchmark datasets and demonstrate how the FaceChannel achieves a comparable, if not better, performance to the current state-of-the-art in FER. Our experiments include cross-dataset analysis, to estimate how our model behaves on different affective recognition conditions. We conclude our paper with an analysis of how FaceChannel learns and adapts the learned facial features towards the different datasets.


2021 ◽  
Vol 40 (3) ◽  
pp. 1-13
Author(s):  
Lumin Yang ◽  
Jiajie Zhuang ◽  
Hongbo Fu ◽  
Xiangzhi Wei ◽  
Kun Zhou ◽  
...  

We introduce SketchGNN , a convolutional graph neural network for semantic segmentation and labeling of freehand vector sketches. We treat an input stroke-based sketch as a graph with nodes representing the sampled points along input strokes and edges encoding the stroke structure information. To predict the per-node labels, our SketchGNN uses graph convolution and a static-dynamic branching network architecture to extract the features at three levels, i.e., point-level, stroke-level, and sketch-level. SketchGNN significantly improves the accuracy of the state-of-the-art methods for semantic sketch segmentation (by 11.2% in the pixel-based metric and 18.2% in the component-based metric over a large-scale challenging SPG dataset) and has magnitudes fewer parameters than both image-based and sequence-based methods.


Author(s):  
Yunfei Fu ◽  
Hongchuan Yu ◽  
Chih-Kuo Yeh ◽  
Tong-Yee Lee ◽  
Jian J. Zhang

Brushstrokes are viewed as the artist’s “handwriting” in a painting. In many applications such as style learning and transfer, mimicking painting, and painting authentication, it is highly desired to quantitatively and accurately identify brushstroke characteristics from old masters’ pieces using computer programs. However, due to the nature of hundreds or thousands of intermingling brushstrokes in the painting, it still remains challenging. This article proposes an efficient algorithm for brush Stroke extraction based on a Deep neural network, i.e., DStroke. Compared to the state-of-the-art research, the main merit of the proposed DStroke is to automatically and rapidly extract brushstrokes from a painting without manual annotation, while accurately approximating the real brushstrokes with high reliability. Herein, recovering the faithful soft transitions between brushstrokes is often ignored by the other methods. In fact, the details of brushstrokes in a master piece of painting (e.g., shapes, colors, texture, overlaps) are highly desired by artists since they hold promise to enhance and extend the artists’ powers, just like microscopes extend biologists’ powers. To demonstrate the high efficiency of the proposed DStroke, we perform it on a set of real scans of paintings and a set of synthetic paintings, respectively. Experiments show that the proposed DStroke is noticeably faster and more accurate at identifying and extracting brushstrokes, outperforming the other methods.


Electronics ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (14) ◽  
pp. 1614
Author(s):  
Jonghun Jeong ◽  
Jong Sung Park ◽  
Hoeseok Yang

Recently, the necessity to run high-performance neural networks (NN) is increasing even in resource-constrained embedded systems such as wearable devices. However, due to the high computational and memory requirements of the NN applications, it is typically infeasible to execute them on a single device. Instead, it has been proposed to run a single NN application cooperatively on top of multiple devices, a so-called distributed neural network. In the distributed neural network, workloads of a single big NN application are distributed over multiple tiny devices. While the computation overhead could effectively be alleviated by this approach, the existing distributed NN techniques, such as MoDNN, still suffer from large traffics between the devices and vulnerability to communication failures. In order to get rid of such big communication overheads, a knowledge distillation based distributed NN, called Network of Neural Networks (NoNN), was proposed, which partitions the filters in the final convolutional layer of the original NN into multiple independent subsets and derives smaller NNs out of each subset. However, NoNN also has limitations in that the partitioning result may be unbalanced and it considerably compromises the correlation between filters in the original NN, which may result in an unacceptable accuracy degradation in case of communication failure. In this paper, in order to overcome these issues, we propose to enhance the partitioning strategy of NoNN in two aspects. First, we enhance the redundancy of the filters that are used to derive multiple smaller NNs by means of averaging to increase the immunity of the distributed NN to communication failure. Second, we propose a novel partitioning technique, modified from Eigenvector-based partitioning, to preserve the correlation between filters as much as possible while keeping the consistent number of filters distributed to each device. Throughout extensive experiments with the CIFAR-100 (Canadian Institute For Advanced Research-100) dataset, it has been observed that the proposed approach maintains high inference accuracy (over 70%, 1.53× improvement over the state-of-the-art approach), on average, even when a half of eight devices in a distributed NN fail to deliver their partial inference results.


Electronics ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (3) ◽  
pp. 222
Author(s):  
Baigan Zhao ◽  
Yingping Huang ◽  
Hongjian Wei ◽  
Xing Hu

Visual odometry (VO) refers to incremental estimation of the motion state of an agent (e.g., vehicle and robot) by using image information, and is a key component of modern localization and navigation systems. Addressing the monocular VO problem, this paper presents a novel end-to-end network for estimation of camera ego-motion. The network learns the latent subspace of optical flow (OF) and models sequential dynamics so that the motion estimation is constrained by the relations between sequential images. We compute the OF field of consecutive images and extract the latent OF representation in a self-encoding manner. A Recurrent Neural Network is then followed to examine the OF changes, i.e., to conduct sequential learning. The extracted sequential OF subspace is used to compute the regression of the 6-dimensional pose vector. We derive three models with different network structures and different training schemes: LS-CNN-VO, LS-AE-VO, and LS-RCNN-VO. Particularly, we separately train the encoder in an unsupervised manner. By this means, we avoid non-convergence during the training of the whole network and allow more generalized and effective feature representation. Substantial experiments have been conducted on KITTI and Malaga datasets, and the results demonstrate that our LS-RCNN-VO outperforms the existing learning-based VO approaches.


2020 ◽  
Vol 63 (10) ◽  
pp. 856-861
Author(s):  
A. V. Fedosov ◽  
G. V. Chumachenko

The article considers the issues of monitoring the thermal conditions of alloys melting and casting at foundries. It is noted that the least reliable method is when the measurement and fixing the temperature is assigned to the worker. On the other hand, a fully automatic approach is not always available for small foundries. In this regard, the expediency of using an automated approach is shown, in which the measurement is assigned to the worker, and the values are recorded automatically. This method assumes implementation of an algorithm for automatic classification of temperature measurements based on an end-to-end array of data obtained in the production stream. The solving of this task is divided into three stages. Preparing of raw data for classification process is provided on the first stage. On the second stage, the task of measurement classification is solved by using neural network principles. Analysis of the results of the artificial neural network has shown its high efficiency and degree of their correspondence with the actual situation on the work site. It was also noted that the application of artificial neural networks principles makes the classification process flexible, due to the ability to easily supplement the process with new parameters and neurons. The final stage is analysis of the obtained results. Correctly performed data classification provides an opportunity not only to assess compliance with technological discipline at the site, but also to improve the process of identifying the causes of casting defects. Application of the proposed approach allows us to reduce the influence of human factor in the analysis of thermal conditions of alloys melting and casting with minimal costs for melting monitoring.


2021 ◽  
Vol 7 ◽  
pp. e495
Author(s):  
Saleh Albahli ◽  
Hafiz Tayyab Rauf ◽  
Abdulelah Algosaibi ◽  
Valentina Emilia Balas

Artificial intelligence (AI) has played a significant role in image analysis and feature extraction, applied to detect and diagnose a wide range of chest-related diseases. Although several researchers have used current state-of-the-art approaches and have produced impressive chest-related clinical outcomes, specific techniques may not contribute many advantages if one type of disease is detected without the rest being identified. Those who tried to identify multiple chest-related diseases were ineffective due to insufficient data and the available data not being balanced. This research provides a significant contribution to the healthcare industry and the research community by proposing a synthetic data augmentation in three deep Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) architectures for the detection of 14 chest-related diseases. The employed models are DenseNet121, InceptionResNetV2, and ResNet152V2; after training and validation, an average ROC-AUC score of 0.80 was obtained competitive as compared to the previous models that were trained for multi-class classification to detect anomalies in x-ray images. This research illustrates how the proposed model practices state-of-the-art deep neural networks to classify 14 chest-related diseases with better accuracy.


2020 ◽  
Vol 34 (04) ◽  
pp. 3898-3905 ◽  
Author(s):  
Claudio Gallicchio ◽  
Alessio Micheli

We address the efficiency issue for the construction of a deep graph neural network (GNN). The approach exploits the idea of representing each input graph as a fixed point of a dynamical system (implemented through a recurrent neural network), and leverages a deep architectural organization of the recurrent units. Efficiency is gained by many aspects, including the use of small and very sparse networks, where the weights of the recurrent units are left untrained under the stability condition introduced in this work. This can be viewed as a way to study the intrinsic power of the architecture of a deep GNN, and also to provide insights for the set-up of more complex fully-trained models. Through experimental results, we show that even without training of the recurrent connections, the architecture of small deep GNN is surprisingly able to achieve or improve the state-of-the-art performance on a significant set of tasks in the field of graphs classification.


Author(s):  
Esteban Real ◽  
Alok Aggarwal ◽  
Yanping Huang ◽  
Quoc V. Le

The effort devoted to hand-crafting neural network image classifiers has motivated the use of architecture search to discover them automatically. Although evolutionary algorithms have been repeatedly applied to neural network topologies, the image classifiers thus discovered have remained inferior to human-crafted ones. Here, we evolve an image classifier— AmoebaNet-A—that surpasses hand-designs for the first time. To do this, we modify the tournament selection evolutionary algorithm by introducing an age property to favor the younger genotypes. Matching size, AmoebaNet-A has comparable accuracy to current state-of-the-art ImageNet models discovered with more complex architecture-search methods. Scaled to larger size, AmoebaNet-A sets a new state-of-theart 83.9% top-1 / 96.6% top-5 ImageNet accuracy. In a controlled comparison against a well known reinforcement learning algorithm, we give evidence that evolution can obtain results faster with the same hardware, especially at the earlier stages of the search. This is relevant when fewer compute resources are available. Evolution is, thus, a simple method to effectively discover high-quality architectures.


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