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Learning portable neural networks is very essential for computer vision for the purpose that pre-trained heavy deep models can be well applied on edge devices such as mobile phones and micro sensors. Most existing deep neural network compression and speed-up methods are very effective for training compact deep models, when we can directly access the training dataset. However, training data for the given deep network are often unavailable due to some practice problems (e.g. privacy, legal issue, and transmission), and the architecture of the given network are also unknown except some interfaces. To this end, we propose a novel framework for training efficient deep neural networks by exploiting generative adversarial networks (GANs). To be specific, the pre-trained teacher networks are regarded as a fixed discriminator and the generator is utilized for derivating training samples which can obtain the maximum response on the discriminator. Then, an efficient network with smaller model size and computational complexity is trained using the generated data and the teacher network, simultaneously. Efficient student networks learned using the proposed Data-Free Learning (DAFL) method achieve 92.22% and 74.47% accuracies using ResNet-18 without any training data on the CIFAR-10 and CIFAR-100 datasets, respectively. Meanwhile, our student network obtains an 80.56% accuracy on the CelebA benchmark.

Compared with cheap addition operation, multiplication operation is of much higher computation complexity. The widely-used convolutions in deep neural networks are exactly cross-correlation to measure the similarity between input feature and convolution filters, which involves massive multiplications between float values. In this paper, we present adder networks (AdderNets) to trade these massive multiplications in deep neural networks, especially convolutional neural networks (CNNs), for much cheaper additions to reduce computation costs. In AdderNets, we take the 1 -norm distance between filters and input feature as the output response. The influence of this new similarity measure on the optimization of neural network have been thoroughly analyzed. To achieve a better performance, we develop a special back-propagation approach for Adder-Nets by investigating the full-precision gradient. We then propose an adaptive learning rate strategy to enhance the training procedure of AdderNets according to the magnitude of each neuron's gradient. As a result, the proposed AdderNets can achieve 74.9% Top-1 accuracy 91.7% Top-5 accuracy using ResNet-50 on the ImageNet dataset without any multiplication in convolution layer.

As the computing power of modern hardware is increasing strongly, pre-trained deep learning models (e.g., BERT, GPT-3) learned on large-scale datasets have shown their effectiveness over conventional methods. The big progress is mainly contributed to the representation ability of transformer and its variant architectures. In this paper, we study the low-level computer vision task (e.g., denoising, super-resolution and deraining) and develop a new pretrained model, namely, image processing transformer (IPT). To maximally excavate the capability of transformer, we present to utilize the well-known ImageNet benchmark for generating a large amount of corrupted image pairs. The IPT model is trained on these images with multi-heads and multi-tails. In addition, the contrastive learning is introduced for well adapting to different image processing tasks. The pre-trained model can therefore efficiently employed on desired task after fine-tuning. With only one pre-trained model, IPT outperforms the current state-of-the-art methods on various low-level benchmarks.

Generative adversarial networks (GANs) have been successfully used for considerable computer vision tasks, especially the image-to-image translation. However, generators in these networks are of complicated architectures with large number of parameters and huge computational complexities. Existing methods are mainly designed for compressing and speeding-up deep neural networks in the classification task, and cannot be directly applied on GANs for image translation, due to their different objectives and training procedures. To this end, we develop a novel co-evolutionary approach for reducing their memory usage and FLOPs simultaneously. In practice, generators for two image domains are encoded as two populations and synergistically optimized for investigating the most important convolution filters iteratively. Fitness of each individual is calculated using the number of parameters, a discriminator-aware regularization, and the cycle consistency. Extensive experiments conducted on benchmark datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method for obtaining compact and effective generators.

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Deep convolutional neural networks have been widely used in numerous applications, but their demanding storage and computational resource requirements prevent their applications on mobile devices. Knowledge distillation aims to optimize a portable student network by taking the knowledge from a well-trained heavy teacher network. Traditional teacher-student based methods used to rely on additional fully-connected layers to bridge intermediate layers of teacher and student networks, which brings in a large number of auxiliary parameters. In contrast, this paper aims to propagate information from teacher to student without introducing new variables which need to be optimized. We regard the teacher-student paradigm from a new perspective of feature embedding. By introducing the locality preserving loss, the student network is encouraged to generate the low-dimensional features which could inherit intrinsic properties of their corresponding high-dimensional features from teacher network. The resulting portable network thus can naturally maintain the performance as that of the teacher network. Theoretical analysis is provided to justify the lower computation complexity of the proposed method. Experiments on benchmark datasets and well-trained networks suggest that the proposed algorithm is superior to state-of-the-art teacher-student learning methods in terms of computational and storage complexity.