An official website of the United States government
Neural architecture search (NAS) and network pruning are widely studied efficient AI techniques, but not yet perfect.NAS performs exhaustive candidate architecture search, incurring tremendous search cost.Though (structured) pruning can simply shrink model dimension, it remains unclear how to decide the per-layer sparsity automatically and optimally.In this work, we revisit the problem of layer-width optimization and propose Pruning-as-Search (PaS), an end-to-end channel pruning method to search out desired sub-network automatically and efficiently.Specifically, we add a depth-wise binary convolution to learn pruning policies directly through gradient descent.By combining the structural reparameterization and PaS, we successfully searched out a new family of VGG-like and lightweight networks, which enable the flexibility of arbitrary width with respect to each layer instead of each stage.Experimental results show that our proposed architecture outperforms prior arts by around 1.0% top-1 accuracy under similar inference speed on ImageNet-1000 classification task.Furthermore, we demonstrate the effectiveness of our width search on complex tasks including instance segmentation and image translation.Code and models are released.
more »
« less
Ultrafast Photorealistic Style Transfer via Neural Architecture Search
The key challenge in photorealistic style transfer is that an algorithm should faithfully transfer the style of a reference photo to a content photo while the generated image should look like one captured by a camera. Although several photorealistic style transfer algorithms have been proposed, they need to rely on post- and/or pre-processing to make the generated images look photorealistic. If we disable the additional processing, these algorithms would fail to produce plausible photorealistic stylization in terms of detail preservation and photorealism. In this work, we propose an effective solution to these issues. Our method consists of a construction step (C-step) to build a photorealistic stylization network and a pruning step (P-step) for acceleration. In the C-step, we propose a dense auto-encoder named PhotoNet based on a carefully designed pre-analysis. PhotoNet integrates a feature aggregation module (BFA) and instance normalized skip links (INSL). To generate faithful stylization, we introduce multiple style transfer modules in the decoder and INSLs. PhotoNet significantly outperforms existing algorithms in terms of both efficiency and effectiveness. In the P-step, we adopt a neural architecture search method to accelerate PhotoNet. We propose an automatic network pruning framework in the manner of teacher-student learning for photorealistic stylization. The network architecture named PhotoNAS resulted from the search achieves significant acceleration over PhotoNet while keeping the stylization effects almost intact. We conduct extensive experiments on both image and video transfer. The results show that our method can produce favorable results while achieving 20-30 times acceleration in comparison with the existing state-of-the-art approaches. It is worth noting that the proposed algorithm accomplishes better performance without any pre- or post-processing.
more »
« less
- Award ID(s):
- 1704337
- PAR ID:
- 10168531
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence
- ISSN:
- 2159-5399
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
More Like this
-
-
Neural Architecture Search (NAS) and its variants are competitive in many computer vision tasks lately. In this paper, we develop a Cooperative Architecture Search and Distillation (CASD) method for network compression. Compared with prior art, our method achieves better performance in ResNet-164 pruning on CIFAR-10 and CIFAR-100 image classifications, promising to be extended to other tasks.more » « less
-
Portrait cartoonization aims at translating a portrait image to its cartoon version, which guarantees two conditions, namely, reducing textural details and synthesizing cartoon facial features (e.g., big eyes or line-drawing nose). To address this problem, we propose a two-stage training scheme based on GAN, which is powerful for stylization problems. The abstraction stage with a novel abstractive loss is used to reduce textural details. Meanwhile, the perception stage is adopted to synthesize cartoon facial features. To comprehensively evaluate the proposed method and other state-of-the-art methods for portrait cartoonization, we contribute a new challenging large-scale dataset named CartoonFace10K. In addition, we find that the popular metric FID focuses on the target style yet ignores the preservation of the input image content. We thus introduce a novel metric FISI, which compromises FID and SSIM to focus on both target features and retaining input content. Quantitative and qualitative results demonstrate that our proposed method outperforms other state-of-the-art methods.more » « less
-
The memristor crossbar array has emerged as an intrinsically suitable matrix computation and low-power acceleration framework for DNN applications. Many techniques such as memristor-based weight pruning and memristor-based quantization have been studied. However, the high accuracy solution for the above techniques is still waiting for unraveling. In this paper, we propose a memristor-based DNN framework which combines both structured weight pruning and quantization by incorporating ADMM algorithm for better pruning and quantization performance. We also discover the non-optimality of the ADMM solution in weight pruning and the unused data path in a structured pruned model. We design a software-hardware co-optimization framework which contains the first proposed Network Purification and Unused Path Removal algorithms targeting on post-processing a structured pruned model after ADMM steps. By taking memristor hardware constraints into our whole framework, we achieve extreme high compression rate with minimum accuracy loss. For quantizing structured pruned model, our framework achieves nearly no accuracy loss after quantizing weights to 8-bit memristor weight representation. We share our models at anonymous link https://bit.ly/2VnMUy0.more » « less
-
Though recent years have witnessed remarkable progress in single image super-resolution (SISR) tasks with the prosperous development of deep neural networks (DNNs), the deep learning methods are confronted with the computation and memory consumption issues in practice, especially for resource-limited platforms such as mobile devices. To overcome the challenge and facilitate the real-time deployment of SISR tasks on mobile, we combine neural architecture search with pruning search and propose an automatic search framework that derives sparse super-resolution (SR) models with high image quality while satisfying the real-time inference requirement. To decrease the search cost, we leverage the weight sharing strategy by introducing a supernet and decouple the search problem into three stages, including supernet construction, compiler-aware architecture and pruning search, and compiler-aware pruning ratio search. With the proposed framework, we are the first to achieve real-time SR inference (with only tens of milliseconds per frame) for implementing 720p resolution with competitive image quality (in terms of PSNR and SSIM) on mobile platforms (Samsung Galaxy S20).more » « less
- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
-
Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Journal Article:
- The DOI is not currently available.
