Orders Of Magnitude Fewer Parameters Research Articles

A Rehabilitation of Pixel-Based Spectral Reconstruction from RGB Images.

Recently, many deep neural networks (DNN) have been proposed to solve the spectral reconstruction (SR) problem: recovering spectra from RGB measurements. Most DNNs seek to learn the relationship between an RGB viewed in a given spatial context and its corresponding spectra. Significantly, it is argued that the same RGB can map to different spectra depending on the context with respect to which it is seen and, more generally, that accounting for spatial context leads to improved SR. However, as it stands, DNN performance is only slightly better than the much simpler pixel-based methods where spatial context is not used. In this paper, we present a new pixel-based algorithm called A++ (an extension of the A+ sparse coding algorithm). In A+, RGBs are clustered, and within each cluster, a designated linear SR map is trained to recover spectra. In A++, we cluster the spectra instead in an attempt to ensure neighboring spectra (i.e., spectra in the same cluster) are recovered by the same SR map. A polynomial regression framework is developed to estimate the spectral neighborhoods given only the RGB values in testing, which in turn determines which mapping should be used to map each testing RGB to its reconstructed spectrum. Compared to the leading DNNs, not only does A++ deliver the best results, it is parameterized by orders of magnitude fewer parameters and has a significantly faster implementation. Moreover, in contradistinction to some DNN methods, A++ uses pixel-based processing, which is robust to image manipulations that alter the spatial context (e.g., blurring and rotations). Our demonstration on the scene relighting application also shows that, while SR methods, in general, provide more accurate relighting results compared to the traditional diagonal matrix correction, A++ provides superior color accuracy and robustness compared to the top DNN methods.

Enhancing the accuracy of density functional tight binding models through ChIMES many-body interaction potentials.

Semi-empirical quantum models such as Density Functional Tight Binding (DFTB) are attractive methods for obtaining quantum simulation data at longer time and length scales than possible with standard approaches. However, application of these models can require lengthy effort due to the lack of a systematic approach for their development. In this work, we discuss the use of the Chebyshev Interaction Model for Efficient Simulation (ChIMES) to create rapidly parameterized DFTB models, which exhibit strong transferability due to the inclusion of many-body interactions that might otherwise be inaccurate. We apply our modeling approach to silicon polymorphs and review previous work on titanium hydride. We also review the creation of a general purpose DFTB/ChIMES model for organic molecules and compounds that approaches hybrid functional and coupled cluster accuracy with two orders of magnitude fewer parameters than similar neural network approaches. In all cases, DFTB/ChIMES yields similar accuracy to the underlying quantum method with orders of magnitude improvement in computational cost. Our developments provide a way to create computationally efficient and highly accurate simulations over varying extreme thermodynamic conditions, where physical and chemical properties can be difficult to interrogate directly, and there is historically a significant reliance on theoretical approaches for interpretation and validation of experimental results.

Learning trivializing gradient flows for lattice gauge theories

We propose a unifying approach that starts from the perturbative construction of trivializing maps by L\"uscher and then improves on it by learning. The resulting continuous normalizing flow model can be implemented using common tools of lattice field theory and requires several orders of magnitude fewer parameters than any existing machine learning approach. Specifically, our model can achieve competitive performance with as few as 14 parameters while existing deep-learning models have around 1 million parameters for $SU(3)$ Yang--Mills theory on a $16^2$ lattice. This has obvious consequences for training speed and interpretability. It also provides a plausible path for scaling machine-learning approaches toward realistic theories.

ICE: Implicit Coordinate Encoder for Multiple Image Neural Representation.

In recent years, implicit neural representations (INR) have shown their great potential to solve many computer graphics and computer vision problems. With this technique, signals such as 2D images or 3D shapes can be fit by training multi-layer perceptrons (MLP) on continuous functions, providing many advantages over conventional discrete representations. Despite being considered a promising approach to 2D image encoding and compression, the application of INR to image collections remains a challenge, since the number of parameters needed rapidly grow with the number of images. In this paper, we propose a fully implicit approach to INR which drastically reduces the size of MLP models in multiple image representation tasks. We introduce the concept of implicit coordinate encoder (ICE) and show it can be used to scale INR with the image number; specifically, by learning a common feature space between images. Furthermore, we show that our method is valid not only for image collections but also for large (gigapixel) images by applying a "divide-and-conquer" strategy. We propose an auto-encoder deep neural network architecture, with a single ICE (encoder) and multiple MLP (decoders), which are jointly trained following a multi-task learning strategy. We demonstrate the benefits coming from ICE when it is implemented as a one-dimensional convolutional encoder, including a better performance of the downstream MLP models with an order of magnitude fewer parameters. Our method is the first one to make use of convolutional blocks in INR networks, unlike the conventional approach of using MLP architectures only. We show the benefits of ICE in two experimental scenarios: a collection of twenty-four small ( 768×512 ) images (Kodak dataset), and a single large ( 3072×3072 ) image (dwarf planet Pluto), achieving better quality than previous fully-implicit methods, using up to 50% fewer parameters.

Attention-Based Neural Architecture Search for Person Re-Identification.

Recent years have witnessed significant progress of person reidentification (reID) driven by expert-designed deep neural network architectures. Despite the remarkable success, such architectures often suffer from high model complexity and time-consuming pretraining process, as well as the mismatches between the image classification-driven backbones and the reID task. To address these issues, we introduce neural architecture search (NAS) into automatically designing person reID backbones, i.e., reID-NAS, which is achieved via automatically searching attention-based network architectures from scratch. Different from traditional NAS approaches that originated for image classification, we design a reID-based search space as well as a search objective to fit NAS for the reID tasks. In terms of the search space, reID-NAS includes a lightweight attention module to precisely locate arbitrary pedestrian bounding boxes, which is automatically added as attention to the reID architectures. In terms of the search objective, reID-NAS introduces a new retrieval objective to search and train reID architectures from scratch. Finally, we propose a hybrid optimization strategy to improve the search stability in reID-NAS. In our experiments, we validate the effectiveness of different parts in reID-NAS, and show that the architecture searched by reID-NAS achieves a new state of the art, with one order of magnitude fewer parameters on three-person reID datasets. As a concomitant benefit, the reliance on the pretraining process is vastly reduced by reID-NAS, which facilitates one to directly search and train a lightweight reID model from scratch.

Parameter-efficient deep probabilistic forecasting

Probabilistic time series forecasting is crucial in many application domains, such as retail, ecommerce, finance, and biology. With the increasing availability of large volumes of data, a number of neural architectures have been proposed for this problem. In particular, Transformer-based methods achieve state-of-the-art performance on real-world benchmarks. However, these methods require a large number of parameters to be learned, which imposes high memory requirements on the computational resources for training such models. To address this problem, we introduce a novel bidirectional temporal convolutional network that requires an order of magnitude fewer parameters than a common Transformer-based approach. Our model combines two temporal convolutional networks: the first network encodes future covariates of the time series, whereas the second network encodes past observations and covariates. We jointly estimate the parameters of an output distribution via these two networks. Experiments on four real-world datasets show that our method performs on par with four state-of-the-art probabilistic forecasting methods, including a Transformer-based approach and WaveNet, on two point metrics (sMAPE and NRMSE) as well as on a set of range metrics (quantile loss percentiles) in the majority of cases. We also demonstrate that our method requires significantly fewer parameters than Transformer-based methods, which means that the model can be trained faster with significantly lower memory requirements, which as a consequence reduces the infrastructure cost for deploying these models.

A Nonautonomous Equation Discovery Method for Time Signal Classification

Certain neural network architectures, in the infinite-layer limit, lead to systems of nonlinear differential equations. Motivated by this idea, we develop a framework for analyzing time signals based on non-autonomous dynamical equations. We view the time signal as a forcing function for a dynamical system that governs a time-evolving hidden variable. As in equation discovery, the dynamical system is represented using a dictionary of functions and the coefficients are learned from data. This framework is applied to the time signal classification problem. We show how gradients can be efficiently computed using the adjoint method, and we apply methods from dynamical systems to establish stability of the classifier. Through a variety of experiments, on both synthetic and real datasets, we show that the proposed method uses orders of magnitude fewer parameters than competing methods, while achieving comparable accuracy. We created the synthetic datasets using dynamical systems of increasing complexity; though the ground truth vector fields are often polynomials, we find consistently that a Fourier dictionary yields the best results. We also demonstrate how the proposed method yields graphical interpretability in the form of phase portraits.

Mapping single-cell data to reference atlases by transfer learning

Large single-cell atlases are now routinely generated to serve as references for analysis of smaller-scale studies. Yet learning from reference data is complicated by batch effects between datasets, limited availability of computational resources and sharing restrictions on raw data. Here we introduce a deep learning strategy for mapping query datasets on top of a reference called single-cell architectural surgery (scArches). scArches uses transfer learning and parameter optimization to enable efficient, decentralized, iterative reference building and contextualization of new datasets with existing references without sharing raw data. Using examples from mouse brain, pancreas, immune and whole-organism atlases, we show that scArches preserves biological state information while removing batch effects, despite using four orders of magnitude fewer parameters than de novo integration. scArches generalizes to multimodal reference mapping, allowing imputation of missing modalities. Finally, scArches retains coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) disease variation when mapping to a healthy reference, enabling the discovery of disease-specific cell states. scArches will facilitate collaborative projects by enabling iterative construction, updating, sharing and efficient use of reference atlases.

A NEAT quantum error decoder

We investigate the use of the evolutionary NEAT algorithm for the optimization of a policy network that performs quantum error decoding on the toric code, with bitflip and depolarizing noise, one qubit at a time. We find that these NEAT-optimized network decoders have similar performance to previously reported machine-learning based decoders, but use roughly three to four orders of magnitude fewer parameters to do so.

One shot 3D photography

3D photography is a new medium that allows viewers to more fully experience a captured moment. In this work, we refer to a 3D photo as one that displays parallax induced by moving the viewpoint (as opposed to a stereo pair with a fixed viewpoint). 3D photos are static in time, like traditional photos, but are displayed with interactive parallax on mobile or desktop screens, as well as on Virtual Reality devices, where viewing it also includes stereo. We present an end-to-end system for creating and viewing 3D photos, and the algorithmic and design choices therein. Our 3D photos are captured in a single shot and processed directly on a mobile device. The method starts by estimating depth from the 2D input image using a new monocular depth estimation network that is optimized for mobile devices. It performs competitively to the state-of-the-art, but has lower latency and peak memory consumption and uses an order of magnitude fewer parameters. The resulting depth is lifted to a layered depth image, and new geometry is synthesized in parallax regions. We synthesize color texture and structures in the parallax regions as well, using an inpainting network, also optimized for mobile devices, on the LDI directly. Finally, we convert the result into a mesh-based representation that can be efficiently transmitted and rendered even on low-end devices and over poor network connections. Altogether, the processing takes just a few seconds on a mobile device, and the result can be instantly viewed and shared. We perform extensive quantitative evaluation to validate our system and compare its new components against the current state-of-the-art.

DEEP DOMAIN ADAPTATION BY WEIGHTED ENTROPY MINIMIZATION FOR THE CLASSIFICATION OF AERIAL IMAGES

Abstract. Fully convolutional neural networks (FCN) are successfully used for the automated pixel-wise classification of aerial images and possibly additional data. However, they require many labelled training samples to perform well. One approach addressing this issue is semi-supervised domain adaptation (SSDA). Here, labelled training samples from a source domain and unlabelled samples from a target domain are used jointly to obtain a target domain classifier, without requiring any labelled samples from the target domain. In this paper, a two-step approach for SSDA is proposed. The first step corresponds to a supervised training on the source domain, making use of strong data augmentation to increase the initial performance on the target domain. Secondly, the model is adapted by entropy minimization using a novel weighting strategy. The approach is evaluated on the basis of five domains, corresponding to five cities. Several training variants and adaptation scenarios are tested, indicating that proper data augmentation can already improve the initial target domain performance significantly resulting in an average overall accuracy of 77.5%. The weighted entropy minimization improves the overall accuracy on the target domains in 19 out of 20 scenarios on average by 1.8%. In all experiments a novel FCN architecture is used that yields results comparable to those of the best-performing models on the ISPRS labelling challenge while having an order of magnitude fewer parameters than commonly used FCNs.

Massive MIMO Channel Estimation With an Untrained Deep Neural Network

This paper proposes a deep learning-based channel estimation method for multi-cell interference-limited massive MIMO systems, in which base stations equipped with a large number of antennas serve multiple single-antenna users. The proposed estimator employs a specially designed deep neural network (DNN) based on the deep image prior (DIP) network to first denoise the received signal, followed by conventional least-squares (LS) estimation. We analytically prove that our LS-type deep channel estimator can approach minimum mean square error (MMSE) estimator performance for high-dimensional signals, while avoiding complex channel inversions and knowledge of the channel covariance matrix. This analytical result, while asymptotic, is observed in simulations to be operational for just 64 antennas and 64 subcarriers per OFDM symbol. The proposed method also does not require any training and utilizes several orders of magnitude fewer parameters than conventional DNNs. The proposed deep channel estimator is also robust to pilot contamination and can even completely eliminate it under certain conditions.

On the Use of Tiny Convolutional Neural Networks for Human-Expert-Level Classification Performance in Sonar Imagery

Efficient convolutional neural networks (CNNs) are designed and trained for an underwater target classification task with synthetic aperture sonar (SAS) imagery collected at sea. The main contribution is demonstrating that classification performance that matches, and even surpasses, the level achievable by a human domain expert obtained from tiny CNNs with three to six orders of magnitude fewer parameters than have traditionally been used in the literature. In doing so, this work represents the first large-scale classification study in the sonar domain to establish a favorable comparison between automated algorithm performance and human ability. Extensive experimental results on challenging real-world SAS image data sets collected in diverse environments and conditions demonstrate that the CNNs possess strong generalization ability. These findings should significantly impact the manner in which CNNs are utilized in the underwater remote-sensing community. To wit, the tiny CNNs proposed here provide a blueprint for achieving excellent classification performance even with limited computing power or limited data.

Fully numerical Hartree‐Fock and density functional calculations. II. Diatomic molecules

AbstractWe present the implementation of a variational finite element solver in the HelFEM program for benchmark calculations on diatomic systems. A basis set of the form is used, where (μ, ν, φ) are transformed prolate spheroidal coordinates, B n(μ) are finite element shape functions, and are spherical harmonics. The basis set allows for an arbitrary level of accuracy in calculations on diatomic molecules, which can be performed at present with either nonrelativistic Hartree‐Fock (HF) or density functional (DF) theory. Hundreds of DFs at the local spin density approximation (LDA), generalized gradient approximation (GGA), and the meta‐GGA level can be used through an interface with the Libxc library; meta‐GGA and hybrid DFs are not available in other fully numerical diatomic program packages. Finite electric fields are also supported in HelFEM, enabling access to electric properties. We introduce a powerful tool for adaptively choosing the basis set by using the core Hamiltonian as a proxy for its completeness. HelFEM and the novel basis set procedure are demonstrated by reproducing the restricted open‐shell HF limit energies of 68 diatomic molecules from the first to the fourth period with excellent agreement with literature values, despite requiring orders of magnitude fewer parameters for the wave function. Then, the electric properties of the BH and N2 molecules under finite field are studied, again yielding excellent agreement with previous HF limit values for energies, dipole moments, and dipole polarizabilities, again with much more compact wave functions than what were needed for the literature references. Finally, HF, LDA, GGA, and meta‐GGA calculations of the atomization energy of N2 are performed, demonstrating the superb accuracy of the present approach.

Mixtures of Lightweight Deep Convolutional Neural Networks: Applied to Agricultural Robotics

We propose a novel approach for training deep convolutional neural networks (DCNNs) that allows us to tradeoff complexity and accuracy to learn lightweight models suitable for robotic platforms such as AgBot II (which performs automated weed management). Our approach consists of three stages, the first is to adapt a pre-trained model to the task at hand. This provides state-of-the-art performance but at the cost of high computational complexity resulting in a low frame rate of just 0.12 frames per second (fps). Second, we use the adapted model and employ model compression techniques to learn a lightweight DCNN that is less accurate but has two orders of magnitude fewer parameters. Third, $K$ lightweight models are combined as a mixture model to further enhance the performance of the lightweight models. Applied to the challenging task of weed segmentation, we improve the accuracy from 85.9%, using a traditional approach, to 93.9% by adapting a complicated pre-trained DCNN with 25M parameters (Inception-v3). The downside to this adapted model, Adapted-IV3, is that it can only process 0.12 fps. To make this approach fast while still retaining accuracy, we learn lightweight DCNNs which when combined can achieve accuracy greater than 90% while using considerably fewer parameters capable of processing between 1.07 and 1.83 fps, up to an order of magnitude faster and up to an order of magnitude fewer parameters.

A new multigroup method for cross-sections that vary rapidly in energy

We present a numerical method for solving the time-independent thermal radiative transfer (TRT) equation or the neutron transport (NT) equation when the opacity (cross-section) varies rapidly in frequency (energy) on the microscale ε; ε corresponds to the characteristic spacing between absorption lines or resonances, and is much smaller than the macroscopic frequency (energy) variation of interest. The approach is based on a rigorous homogenization of the TRT/NT equation in the frequency (energy) variable. Discretization of the homogenized TRT/NT equation results in a multigroup-type system, and can therefore be solved by standard methods.We demonstrate the accuracy and efficiency of the approach on three model problems. First we consider the Elsasser band model with constant temperature and a line spacing ε=10−4. Second, we consider a neutron transport application for fast neutrons incident on iron, where the characteristic resonance spacing ε necessitates ≈16,000 energy discretization parameters if Planck-weighted cross sections are used. Third, we consider an atmospheric TRT problem for an opacity corresponding to water vapor over a frequency range 1000–2000cm−1, where we take 12 homogeneous layers between 1–15km, and temperature/pressure values in each layer from the standard US atmosphere. For all three problems, we demonstrate that we can achieve between 0.1 and 1 percent relative error in the solution, and with several orders of magnitude fewer parameters than a standard multigroup formulation using Planck-weighted (source-weighted) opacities for a comparable accuracy.

Adaptation to New Microphones Using Artificial Neural Networks With Trainable Activation Functions.

Model adaptation is a key technique that enables a modern automatic speech recognition (ASR) system to adjust its parameters, using a small amount of enrolment data, to the nuances in the speech spectrum due to microphone mismatch in the training and test data. In this brief, we investigate four different adaptation schemes for connectionist (also known as hybrid) ASR systems that learn microphone-specific hidden unit contributions, given some adaptation material. This solution is made possible adopting one of the following schemes: 1) the use of Hermite activation functions; 2) the introduction of bias and slope parameters in the sigmoid activation functions; 3) the injection of an amplitude parameter specific for each sigmoid unit; or 4) the combination of 2) and 3). Such a simple yet effective solution allows the adapted model to be stored in a small-sized storage space, a highly desirable property of adaptation algorithms for deep neural networks that are suitable for large-scale online deployment. Experimental results indicate that the investigated approaches reduce word error rates on the standard Spoke 6 task of the Wall Street Journal corpus compared with unadapted ASR systems. Moreover, the proposed adaptation schemes all perform better than simple multicondition training and comparable favorably against conventional linear regression-based approaches while using up to 15 orders of magnitude fewer parameters. The proposed adaptation strategies are also effective when a single adaptation sentence is available.

Scene analysis by mid-level attribute learning using 2D LSTM networks and an application to web-image tagging

This paper describes an approach to scene analysis based on supervised training of 2D Long Short-Term Memory recurrent neural networks (LSTM networks). Unlike previous methods, our approach requires no manual construction of feature hierarchies or incorporation of other prior knowledge. Rather, like deep learning approaches using convolutional networks, our recognition networks are trained directly on raw pixel values. However, in contrast to convolutional neural networks, our approach uses 2D LSTM networks at all levels. Our networks yield per pixel mid-level classifications of input images; since training data for such applications is not available in large numbers, we describe an approach to generating artificial training data, and then evaluate the trained networks on real-world images. Our approach performed significantly better than others methods including Convolutional Neural Networks (ConvNet), yet using two orders of magnitude fewer parameters. We further show the experiment on a recently published dataset, outdoor scene attribute dataset for fair comparisons of scene attribute learning which had significant performance improvement (ca. 21%). Finally, our approach is successfully applied on a real-world application, automatic web-image tagging.

A simple model of mechanotransduction in primate glabrous skin

Tactile stimulation of the hand evokes highly precise and repeatable patterns of activity in mechanoreceptive afferents; the strength (i.e., firing rate) and timing of these responses have been shown to convey stimulus information. To achieve an understanding of the mechanisms underlying the representation of tactile stimuli in the nerve, we developed a two-stage computational model consisting of a nonlinear mechanical transduction stage followed by a generalized integrate-and-fire mechanism. The model improves upon a recently published counterpart in two important ways. First, complexity is dramatically reduced (at least one order of magnitude fewer parameters). Second, the model comprises a saturating nonlinearity and therefore can be applied to a much wider range of stimuli. We show that both the rate and timing of afferent responses are predicted with remarkable precision and that observed adaptation patterns and threshold behavior are well captured. We conclude that the responses of mechanoreceptive afferents can be understood using a very parsimonious mechanistic model, which can then be used to accurately simulate the responses of afferent populations.

Community versus single-species distribution models for British plants

Aim Species distribution models are increasingly used to predict the impacts of global change on whole ecological communities by modelling the individualistic niche responses of large numbers of species. However, it is not clear whether this single-species ensemble approach is preferable to community-wide strategies that represent interspecific associations or shared responses to environmental gradients. Here, we test the performance of two multi-species modelling approaches against equivalent single-species models. Location Great Britain. Methods Single- and multi-species distribution models were fitted for 701 native British plant species at a 10-km grid scale. Two machine learning methods were used – classification and regression trees (CARTs) and artificial neural networks (ANNs). The single-species versions are widely used in ecology but their multivariate extensions are less well known and have not previously been evaluated against one another. We compared their abilities to predict species distributions, community compositions and species richness in an independent geographical region reserved from model-fitting. Results The single- and multi-species models performed similarly, although the community models gave slightly poorer predictive accuracy by all measures. However, from the point of view of the whole community they were much simpler than the array of single-species models, involving orders of magnitude fewer parameters. Multi-species approaches also left greater residual spatial autocorrelation than the individualistic models and, contrary to expectation, were relatively less accurate for rarer species. However, the fitted multi-species response curves had lower tendency for pronounced discontinuities that are unlikely to be a feature of realized niche responses. Main conclusions Although community distribution models were slightly less accurate than single-species models, they offered a highly simplified way of modelling spatial patterns in British plant diversity. Moreover, an advantage of the multi-species approach was that the modelling of shared environmental responses resolved more realistic response curves. However, there was a slight tendency for community models to predict rare species less accurately, which is potentially disadvantageous for conservation applications. We conclude that multi-species distribution models may have potential for understanding and predicting the structure of ecological communities, but were slightly inferior to single-species ensembles for our data.