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1. NETWORK DECONVOLUTION

   Ye, C. ( January 2020 , International Conference on Learning Representations)

   Convolution is a central operation in Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs), which applies a kernel to overlapping regions shifted across the image. However, because of the strong correlations in real-world image data, convolutional kernels are in effect re-learning redundant data. In this work, we show that this redundancy has made neural network training challenging, and propose network deconvolution, a procedure which optimally removes pixel-wise and channel-wise correlations before the data is fed into each layer. Network deconvolution can be efficiently calculated at a fraction of the computational cost of a convolution layer. We also show that the deconvolution filters in the first layer of the network resemble the center-surround structure found in biological neurons in the visual regions of the brain. Filtering with such kernels results in a sparse representation, a desired property that has been missing in the training of neural networks. Learning from the sparse representation promotes faster convergence and superior results without the use of batch normalization. We apply our network deconvolution operation to 10 modern neural network models by replacing batch normalization within each. Extensive experiments show that the network deconvolution operation is able to deliver performance improvement in all cases on the CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, MNIST, Fashion-MNIST, Cityscapes, and ImageNet datasets. 

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2. Training Faster by Separating Modes of Variation in Batch-normalized Models

   https://doi.org/10.1109/TPAMI.2019.2895781  

   Kalayeh, Mahdi M. ; Shah, Mubarak ( January 2019 , IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence)

   Batch Normalization (BN) is essential to effectively train state-of-the-art deep Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN). It normalizes the layer outputs during training using the statistics of each mini-batch. BN accelerates training procedure by allowing to safely utilize large learning rates and alleviates the need for careful initialization of the parameters. In this work, we study BN from the viewpoint of Fisher kernels that arise from generative probability models. We show that assuming samples within a mini-batch are from the same probability density function, then BN is identical to the Fisher vector of a Gaussian distribution. That means batch normalizing transform can be explained in terms of kernels that naturally emerge from the probability density function that models the generative process of the underlying data distribution. Consequently, it promises higher discrimination power for the batch-normalized mini-batch. However, given the rectifying non-linearities employed in CNN architectures, distribution of the layer outputs show an asymmetric characteristic. Therefore, in order for BN to fully benefit from the aforementioned properties, we propose approximating underlying data distribution not with one, but a mixture of Gaussian densities. Deriving Fisher vector for a Gaussian Mixture Model (GMM), reveals that batch normalization can be improved by independently normalizing with respect to the statistics of disentangled sub-populations. We refer to our proposed soft piecewise version of batch normalization as Mixture Normalization (MN). Through extensive set of experiments on CIFAR-10 and CIFAR-100, using both a 5-layers deep CNN and modern Inception-V3 architecture, we show that mixture normalization reduces required number of gradient updates to reach the maximum test accuracy of the batch normalized model by ∼31%-47% across a variety of training scenarios. Replacing even a few BN modules with MN in the 48-layers deep Inception-V3 architecture is sufficient to not only obtain considerable training acceleration but also better final test accuracy. We show that similar observations are valid for 40 and 100-layers deep DenseNet architectures as well. We complement our study by evaluating the application of mixture normalization to the Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs), where "mode collapse" hinders the training process. We solely replace a few batch normalization layers in the generator with our proposed mixture normalization. Our experiments using Deep Convolutional GAN (DCGAN) on CIFAR-10 show that mixture normalized DCGAN not only provides an acceleration of ∼58% but also reaches lower (better) "Fréchet Inception Distance" (FID) of 33.35 compared to 37.56 of its batch normalized counterpart. 

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3. PointConv: Deep Convolutional Networks on 3D Point Clouds

   https://doi.org/10.1109/CVPR.2019.00985  

   Wu, Wenxuan ; Qi, Zhongang ; Fuxin, Li ( June 2019 , 2019 IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR))

   Unlike images which are represented in regular dense grids, 3D point clouds are irregular and unordered, hence applying convolution on them can be difficult. In this paper, we extend the dynamic filter to a new convolution operation, named PointConv. PointConv can be applied on point clouds to build deep convolutional networks. We treat convolution kernels as nonlinear functions of the local coordinates of 3D points comprised of weight and density functions. With respect to a given point, the weight functions are learned with multi-layer perceptron networks and the density functions through kernel density estimation. A novel reformulation is proposed for efficiently computing the weight functions, which allowed us to dramatically scale up the network and significantly improve its performance. The learned convolution kernel can be used to compute translation-invariant and permutation-invariant convolution on any point set in the 3D space. Besides, PointConv can also be used as deconvolution operators to propagate features from a subsampled point cloud back to its original resolution. Experiments on ModelNet40, ShapeNet, and ScanNet show that deep convolutional neural networks built on PointConv are able to achieve state-of-the-art on challenging semantic segmentation benchmarks on 3D point clouds. Besides, our experiments converting CIFAR-10 into a point cloud showed that networks built on PointConv can match the performance of convolutional networks in 2D images of a similar structure. 

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4. Convolutional Normalization: Improving Deep Convolutional Network Robustness and Training

   Liu, Sheng ; Li, Xiao ; Zhai, Yuexiang ; You, Chong ; Zhu, Zhihui ; Fernandez-Granda, Carlos ; Qu, Qing ( January 2021 , Advances in neural information processing systems)

   Normalization techniques have become a basic component in modern convolutional neural networks (ConvNets). In particular, many recent works demonstrate that promoting the orthogonality of the weights helps train deep models and improve robustness. For ConvNets, most existing methods are based on penalizing or normalizing weight matrices derived from concatenating or flattening the convolutional kernels. These methods often destroy or ignore the benign convolutional structure of the kernels; therefore, they are often expensive or impractical for deep ConvNets. In contrast, we introduce a simple and efficient Convolutional Normalization'' (ConvNorm) method that can fully exploit the convolutional structure in the Fourier domain and serve as a simple plug-and-play module to be conveniently incorporated into any ConvNets. Our method is inspired by recent work on preconditioning methods for convolutional sparse coding and can effectively promote each layer's channel-wise isometry. Furthermore, we show that our ConvNorm can reduce the layerwise spectral norm of the weight matrices and hence improve the Lipschitzness of the network, leading to easier training and improved robustness for deep ConvNets. Applied to classification under noise corruptions and generative adversarial network (GAN), we show that the ConvNorm improves the robustness of common ConvNets such as ResNet and the performance of GAN. We verify our findings via numerical experiments on CIFAR and ImageNet. Our implementation is available online at \url{https://github.com/shengliu66/ConvNorm}. 

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5. SHE: A Fast and Accurate Deep Neural Network for Encrypted Data

   Lou, Qian ; Jiang, Lei ( January 2019 , Advances in neural information processing systems)

   Homomorphic Encryption (HE) is one of the most promising security solutions to emerging Machine Learning as a Service (MLaaS). Several Leveled-HE (LHE)-enabled Convolutional Neural Networks (LHECNNs) are proposed to implement MLaaS to avoid the large bootstrapping overhead. However, prior LHECNNs have to pay significant computational overhead but achieve only low inference accuracy, due to their polynomial approximation activations and poolings. Stacking many polynomial approximation activation layers in a network greatly reduces the inference accuracy, since the polynomial approximation activation errors lead to a low distortion of the output distribution of the next batch normalization layer. So the polynomial approximation activations and poolings have become the obstacle to a fast and accurate LHECNN model. In this paper, we propose a Shift-accumulation-based LHE-enabled deep neural network (SHE) for fast and accurate inferences on encrypted data. We use the binary-operation-friendly leveled-TFHE (LTFHE) encryption scheme to implement ReLU activations and max poolings. We also adopt the logarithmic quantization to accelerate inferences by replacing expensive LTFHE multiplications with cheap LTFHE shifts. We propose a mixed bitwidth accumulator to expedite accumulations. Since the LTFHE ReLU activations, max poolings, shifts and accumulations have small multiplicative depth, SHE can implement much deeper network architectures with more convolutional and activation layers. Our experimental results show SHE achieves the state-of-the-art inference accuracy and reduces the inference latency by 76.21% ~ 94.23% over prior LHECNNs on MNIST and CIFAR-10. 

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