The architectures of deep artificial neural networks (DANNs) are routinely studied to improve their predictive performance. However, the relationship between the architecture of a DANN and its robustness to noise and adversarial attacks is less explored, especially in computer vision applications. Here we investigate the relationship between the robustness of DANNs in a vision task and their underlying graph architectures or structures. First we explored the design space of architectures of DANNs using graph-theoretic robustness measures and transformed the graphs to DANN architectures using various image classification tasks. Then we explored the relationship between the robustness of trained DANNs against noise and adversarial attacks and their underlying architectures. We show that robustness performance of DANNs can be quantified before training using graph structural properties such as topological entropy and Olivier-Ricci curvature, with the greatest reliability for complex tasks and large DANNs. Our results can also be applied for tasks other than computer vision such as natural language processing and recommender systems.
This content will become publicly available on April 30, 2024
NASRec: Weight Sharing Neural Architecture Search for Recommender Systems
The rise of deep neural networks offers new opportunities in optimizing recommender systems. However, optimizing recommender systems using deep neural networks requires delicate architecture fabrication. We propose NASRec, a paradigm that trains a single supernet and efficiently produces abundant models/sub-architectures by weight sharing. To overcome the data multi-modality and architecture heterogeneity challenges in the recommendation domain, NASRec establishes a large supernet (i.e., search space) to search the full architectures. The supernet incorporates versatile choice of operators and dense connectivity to minimize human efforts for finding priors. The scale and heterogeneity in NASRec impose several challenges, such as training inefficiency, operator-imbalance, and degraded rank correlation. We tackle these challenges by proposing single-operator any-connection sampling, operator-balancing interaction modules, and post-training fine-tuning. Our crafted models, NASRecNet, show promising results on three Click-Through Rates (CTR) prediction benchmarks, indicating that NASRec outperforms both manually designed models and existing NAS methods with state-of-the-art performance. Our work is publicly available here.
more »
« less
- NSF-PAR ID:
- 10441671
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- the ACM Web Conference 2023
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 1199 to 1207
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
More Like this
-
more » « less
Abstract -
Accurately predicting the ridership of public-transit routes provides substantial benefits to both transit agencies, who can dispatch additional vehicles proactively before the vehicles that serve a route become crowded, and to passengers, who can avoid crowded vehicles based on publicly available predictions. The spread of the coronavirus disease has further elevated the importance of ridership prediction as crowded vehicles now present not only an inconvenience but also a public-health risk. At the same time, accurately predicting ridership has become more challenging due to evolving ridership patterns, which may make all data except for the most recent records stale. One promising approach for improving prediction accuracy is to fine-tune the hyper-parameters of machine-learning models for each transit route based on the characteristics of the particular route, such as the number of records. However, manually designing a machine-learning model for each route is a labor-intensive process, which may require experts to spend a significant amount of their valuable time. To help experts with designing machine-learning models, we propose a neural-architecture and feature search approach, which optimizes the architecture and features of a deep neural network for predicting the ridership of a public-transit route. Our approach is based on a randomized local hyper-parameter search, which minimizes both prediction error as well as the complexity of the model. We evaluate our approach on real-world ridership data provided by the public transit agency of Chattanooga, TN, and we demonstrate that training neural networks whose architectures and features are optimized for each route provides significantly better performance than training neural networks whose architectures and features are generic.more » « less
-
Neural architecture search (NAS) is a promising technique to design efficient and high-performance deep neural networks (DNNs). As the performance requirements of ML applications grow continuously, the hardware accelerators start playing a central role in DNN design. This trend makes NAS even more complicated and time-consuming for most real applications. This paper proposes FLASH, a very fast NAS methodology that co-optimizes the DNN accuracy and performance on a real hardware platform. As the main theoretical contribution, we first propose the NN-Degree, an analytical metric to quantify the topological characteristics of DNNs with skip connections (e.g., DenseNets, ResNets, Wide-ResNets, and MobileNets). The newly proposed NN-Degree allows us to do training-free NAS within one second and build an accuracy predictor by training as few as 25 samples out of a vast search space with more than 63 billion configurations. Second, by performing inference on the target hardware, we fine-tune and validate our analytical models to estimate the latency, area, and energy consumption of various DNN architectures while executing standard ML datasets. Third, we construct a hierarchical algorithm based on simplicial homology global optimization (SHGO) to optimize the model-architecture co-design process, while considering the area, latency, and energy consumption of the target hardware. We demonstrate that, compared to the state-of-the-art NAS approaches, our proposed hierarchical SHGO-based algorithm enables more than four orders of magnitude speedup (specifically, the execution time of the proposed algorithm is about 0.1 seconds). Finally, our experimental evaluations show that FLASH is easily transferable to different hardware architectures, thus enabling us to do NAS on a Raspberry Pi-3B processor in less than 3 seconds.more » « less
-
Raynal, Ann M. ; Ranney, Kenneth I. (Ed.)Most research in technologies for the Deaf community have focused on translation using either video or wearable devices. Sensor-augmented gloves have been reported to yield higher gesture recognition rates than camera-based systems; however, they cannot capture information expressed through head and body movement. Gloves are also intrusive and inhibit users in their pursuit of normal daily life, while cameras can raise concerns over privacy and are ineffective in the dark. In contrast, RF sensors are non-contact, non-invasive and do not reveal private information even if hacked. Although RF sensors are unable to measure facial expressions or hand shapes, which would be required for complete translation, this paper aims to exploit near real-time ASL recognition using RF sensors for the design of smart Deaf spaces. In this way, we hope to enable the Deaf community to benefit from advances in technologies that could generate tangible improvements in their quality of life. More specifically, this paper investigates near real-time implementation of machine learning and deep learning architectures for the purpose of sequential ASL signing recognition. We utilize a 60 GHz RF sensor which transmits a frequency modulation continuous wave (FMWC waveform). RF sensors can acquire a unique source of information that is inaccessible to optical or wearable devices: namely, a visual representation of the kinematic patterns of motion via the micro-Doppler signature. Micro-Doppler refers to frequency modulations that appear about the central Doppler shift, which are caused by rotational or vibrational motions that deviate from principle translational motion. In prior work, we showed that fractal complexity computed from RF data could be used to discriminate signing from daily activities and that RF data could reveal linguistic properties, such as coarticulation. We have also shown that machine learning can be used to discriminate with 99% accuracy the signing of native Deaf ASL users from that of copysigning (or imitation signing) by hearing individuals. Therefore, imitation signing data is not effective for directly training deep models. But, adversarial learning can be used to transform imitation signing to resemble native signing, or, alternatively, physics-aware generative models can be used to synthesize ASL micro-Doppler signatures for training deep neural networks. With such approaches, we have achieved over 90% recognition accuracy of 20 ASL signs. In natural environments, however, near real-time implementations of classification algorithms are required, as well as an ability to process data streams in a continuous and sequential fashion. In this work, we focus on extensions of our prior work towards this aim, and compare the efficacy of various approaches for embedding deep neural networks (DNNs) on platforms such as a Raspberry Pi or Jetson board. We examine methods for optimizing the size and computational complexity of DNNs for embedded micro-Doppler analysis, methods for network compression, and their resulting sequential ASL recognition performance.more » « less
-
null (Ed.)Artificial neural networks (NNs) in deep learning systems are critical drivers of emerging technologies such as computer vision, text classification, and natural language processing. Fundamental to their success is the development of accurate and efficient NN models. In this article, we report our work on Deep-n-Cheap—an open-source automated machine learning (AutoML) search framework for deep learning models. The search includes both architecture and training hyperparameters and supports convolutional neural networks and multi-layer perceptrons, applicable to multiple domains. Our framework is targeted for deployment on both benchmark and custom datasets, and as a result, offers a greater degree of search space customizability as compared to a more limited search over only pre-existing models from literature. We also introduce the technique of ‘search transfer’, which demonstrates the generalization capabilities of the models found by our framework to multiple datasets. Deep-n-Cheap includes a user-customizable complexity penalty which trades off performance with training time or number of parameters. Specifically, our framework can find models with performance comparable to state-of-the- art while taking 1–2 orders of magnitude less time to train than models from other AutoML and model search frameworks. Additionally, we investigate and develop insight into the search process that should aid future development of deep learning models.more » « less
