Align-KD: Distilling Cross-Modal Alignment Knowledge for Mobile Vision-Language Model

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) bring powerful understanding and reasoning capabilities to multimodal tasks. Meanwhile, the great need for capable aritificial intelligence on mobile devices also arises, such as the AI assistant software. Some efforts try to migrate VLMs to edge devices to expand their application scope. Simplifying the model structure is a common method, but as the model shrinks, the trade-off between performance and size becomes more and more difficult. Knowledge distillation (KD) can help models improve comprehensive capabilities without increasing size or data volume. However, most of the existing large model distillation techniques only consider applications on single-modal LLMs, or only use teachers to create new data environments for students. None of these methods take into account the distillation of the most important cross-modal alignment knowledge in VLMs. We propose a method called Align-KD to guide the student model to learn the cross-modal matching that occurs at the shallow layer. The teacher also helps student learn the projection of vision token into text embedding space based on the focus of text. Under the guidance of Align-KD, the 1.7B MobileVLM V2 model can learn rich knowledge from the 7B teacher model with light design of training loss, and achieve an average score improvement of 2.0 across 6 benchmarks under two training subsets respectively. Code is available at: https://github.com/fqhank/Align-KD.

Full-Stage Pseudo Label Quality Enhancement for Weakly-supervised Temporal Action Localization

Weakly-supervised Temporal Action Localization (WSTAL) aims to localize actions in untrimmed videos using only video-level supervision. Latest WSTAL methods introduce pseudo label learning framework to bridge the gap between classification-based training and inferencing targets at localization, and achieve cutting-edge results. In these frameworks, a classification-based model is used to generate pseudo labels for a regression-based student model to learn from. However, the quality of pseudo labels in the framework, which is a key factor to the final result, is not carefully studied. In this paper, we propose a set of simple yet efficient pseudo label quality enhancement mechanisms to build our FuSTAL framework. FuSTAL enhances pseudo label quality at three stages: cross-video contrastive learning at proposal Generation-Stage, prior-based filtering at proposal Selection-Stage and EMA-based distillation at Training-Stage. These designs enhance pseudo label quality at different stages in the framework, and help produce more informative, less false and smoother action proposals. With the help of these comprehensive designs at all stages, FuSTAL achieves an average mAP of 50.8% on THUMOS'14, outperforming the previous best method by 1.2%, and becomes the first method to reach the milestone of 50%.

ExCP: Extreme LLM Checkpoint Compression via Weight-Momentum Joint Shrinking

Large language models (LLM) have recently attracted significant attention in the field of artificial intelligence. However, the training process of these models poses significant challenges in terms of computational and storage capacities, thus compressing checkpoints has become an urgent problem. In this paper, we propose a novel Extreme Checkpoint Compression (ExCP) framework, which significantly reduces the required storage of training checkpoints while achieving nearly lossless performance. We first calculate the residuals of adjacent checkpoints to obtain the essential but sparse information for higher compression ratio. To further excavate the redundancy parameters in checkpoints, we then propose a weight-momentum joint shrinking method to utilize another important information during the model optimization, i.e., momentum. In particular, we exploit the information of both model and optimizer to discard as many parameters as possible while preserving critical information to ensure optimal performance. Furthermore, we utilize non-uniform quantization to further compress the storage of checkpoints. We extensively evaluate our proposed ExCP framework on several models ranging from 410M to 7B parameters and demonstrate significant storage reduction while maintaining strong performance. For instance, we achieve approximately $70\times$ compression for the Pythia-410M model, with the final performance being as accurate as the original model on various downstream tasks. Codes will be available at https://github.com/Gaffey/ExCP.

No Time to Waste: Squeeze Time into Channel for Mobile Video Understanding

Current architectures for video understanding mainly build upon 3D convolutional blocks or 2D convolutions with additional operations for temporal modeling. However, these methods all regard the temporal axis as a separate dimension of the video sequence, which requires large computation and memory budgets and thus limits their usage on mobile devices. In this paper, we propose to squeeze the time axis of a video sequence into the channel dimension and present a lightweight video recognition network, term as \textit{SqueezeTime}, for mobile video understanding. To enhance the temporal modeling capability of the proposed network, we design a Channel-Time Learning (CTL) Block to capture temporal dynamics of the sequence. This module has two complementary branches, in which one branch is for temporal importance learning and another branch with temporal position restoring capability is to enhance inter-temporal object modeling ability. The proposed SqueezeTime is much lightweight and fast with high accuracies for mobile video understanding. Extensive experiments on various video recognition and action detection benchmarks, i.e., Kinetics400, Kinetics600, HMDB51, AVA2.1 and THUMOS14, demonstrate the superiority of our model. For example, our SqueezeTime achieves $+1.2\%$ accuracy and $+80\%$ GPU throughput gain on Kinetics400 than prior methods. Codes are publicly available at https://github.com/xinghaochen/SqueezeTime and https://github.com/mindspore-lab/models/tree/master/research/huawei-noah/SqueezeTime.

TinySAM: Pushing the Envelope for Efficient Segment Anything Model

Recently segment anything model (SAM) has shown powerful segmentation capability and has drawn great attention in computer vision fields. Massive following works have developed various applications based on the pretrained SAM and achieved impressive performance on downstream vision tasks. However, SAM consists of heavy architectures and requires massive computational capacity, which hinders the further application of SAM on computation constrained edge devices. To this end, in this paper we propose a framework to obtain a tiny segment anything model (TinySAM) while maintaining the strong zero-shot performance. We first propose a full-stage knowledge distillation method with online hard prompt sampling strategy to distill a lightweight student model. We also adapt the post-training quantization to the promptable segmentation task and further reduce the computational cost. Moreover, a hierarchical segmenting everything strategy is proposed to accelerate the everything inference by $2\times$ with almost no performance degradation. With all these proposed methods, our TinySAM leads to orders of magnitude computational reduction and pushes the envelope for efficient segment anything task. Extensive experiments on various zero-shot transfer tasks demonstrate the significantly advantageous performance of our TinySAM against counterpart methods. Pre-trained models and codes will be available at https://github.com/xinghaochen/TinySAM and https://gitee.com/mindspore/models/tree/master/research/cv/TinySAM.

CNN-transformer mixed model for object detection

Object detection, one of the three main tasks of computer vision, has been used in various applications. The main process is to use deep neural networks to extract the features of an image and then use the features to identify the class and location of an object. Therefore, the main direction to improve the accuracy of object detection tasks is to improve the neural network to extract features better. In this paper, I propose a convolutional module with a transformer[1], which aims to improve the recognition accuracy of the model by fusing the detailed features extracted by CNN[2] with the global features extracted by a transformer and significantly reduce the computational effort of the transformer module by deflating the feature mAP. The main execution steps are convolutional downsampling to reduce the feature map size, then self-attention calculation and upsampling, and finally concatenation with the initial input. In the experimental part, after splicing the block to the end of YOLOv5n[3] and training 300 epochs on the coco dataset, the mAP improved by 1.7% compared with the previous YOLOv5n, and the mAP curve did not show any saturation phenomenon, so there is still potential for improvement. After 100 rounds of training on the Pascal VOC dataset, the accuracy of the results reached 81%, which is 4.6 better than the faster RCNN[4] using resnet101[5] as the backbone, but the number of parameters is less than one-twentieth of it.

Brain-inspired Multilayer Perceptron with Spiking Neurons

Recently, Multilayer Perceptron (MLP) becomes the hotspot in the field of computer vision tasks. Without inductive bias, MLPs perform well on feature extraction and achieve amazing results. However, due to the simplicity of their structures, the performance highly depends on the local features communication machenism. To further improve the performance of MLP, we introduce information communication mechanisms from brain-inspired neural networks. Spiking Neural Network (SNN) is the most famous brain-inspired neural network, and achieve great success on dealing with sparse data. Leaky Integrate and Fire (LIF) neurons in SNNs are used to communicate between different time steps. In this paper, we incorporate the machanism of LIF neurons into the MLP models, to achieve better accuracy without extra FLOPs. We propose a full-precision LIF operation to communicate between patches, including horizontal LIF and vertical LIF in different directions. We also propose to use group LIF to extract better local features. With LIF modules, our SNN-MLP model achieves 81.9%, 83.3% and 83.5% top-1 accuracy on ImageNet dataset with only 4.4G, 8.5G and 15.2G FLOPs, respectively, which are state-of-the-art results as far as we know.

Winograd Algorithm for AdderNet

Adder neural network (AdderNet) is a new kind of deep model that replaces the original massive multiplications in convolutions by additions while preserving the high performance. Since the hardware complexity of additions is much lower than that of multiplications, the overall energy consumption is thus reduced significantly. To further optimize the hardware overhead of using AdderNet, this paper studies the winograd algorithm, which is a widely used fast algorithm for accelerating convolution and saving the computational costs. Unfortunately, the conventional Winograd algorithm cannot be directly applied to AdderNets since the distributive law in multiplication is not valid for the l1-norm. Therefore, we replace the element-wise multiplication in the Winograd equation by additions and then develop a new set of transform matrixes that can enhance the representation ability of output features to maintain the performance. Moreover, we propose the l2-to-l1 training strategy to mitigate the negative impacts caused by formal inconsistency. Experimental results on both FPGA and benchmarks show that the new method can further reduce the energy consumption without affecting the accuracy of the original AdderNet.

Multi-shot NAS for Discovering Adversarially Robust Convolutional Neural Architectures at Targeted Capacities

Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) are vulnerable to adversarial examples, and studies show that increasing the model capacity of an architecture topology (e.g., width expansion) can bring consistent robustness improvements. This reveals a clear robustness-efficiency trade-off that should be considered in architecture design. Recent studies have employed one-shot neural architecture search (NAS) to discover adversarially robust architectures. However, since the capacities of different topologies cannot be easily aligned during the search process, current one-shot NAS methods might favor topologies with larger capacity in the supernet. And the discovered topology might be sub-optimal when aligned to the targeted capacity. This paper proposes a novel multi-shot NAS method to explicitly search for adversarially robust architectures at a certain targeted capacity. Specifically, we estimate the reward at the targeted capacity using interior extra-polation of the rewards from multiple supernets. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method. For instance, at the targeted FLOPs of 1560M, the discovered MSRobNet-1560 (clean 84.8%, PGD100 52.9%) outperforms the recent NAS-discovered architecture RobNet-free (clean 82.8%, PGD100 52.6%) with similar FLOPs. Codes are available at https://github.com/walkerning/aw_nas.

aw_nas: A Modularized and Extensible NAS framework

Neural Architecture Search (NAS) has received extensive attention due to its capability to discover neural network architectures in an automated manner. aw_nas is an open-source Python framework implementing various NAS algorithms in a modularized manner. Currently, aw_nas can be used to reproduce the results of mainstream NAS algorithms of various types. Also, due to the modularized design, one can simply experiment with different NAS algorithms for various applications with awnas (e.g., classification, detection, text modeling, fault tolerance, adversarial robustness, hardware efficiency, and etc.). Codes and documentation are available at https://github.com/walkerning/aw_nas.