Tensor Train Rank Minimization
Tensor train (TT) decomposition provides a space-efficient representation for higher-order tensors. Despite its advantage, we face two crucial limitations when we apply the TT decomposition to machine learning problems: the lack of statistical theory and of scalable algorithms. In this paper, we address the limitations. First, we introduce a convex relaxation of the TT decomposition problem and derive its error bound for the tensor completion task. Next, we develop an alternating optimization method with a randomization technique, in which the time complexity is as efficient as the space complexity is. In experiments, we numerically confirm the derived bounds and empirically demonstrate the performance of our method with a real higher-order tensor. …

Fast Task-Aware Architecture Inference
Neural architecture search has been shown to hold great promise towards the automation of deep learning. However in spite of its potential, neural architecture search remains quite costly. To this point, we propose a novel gradient-based framework for efficient architecture search by sharing information across several tasks. We start by training many model architectures on several related (training) tasks. When a new unseen task is presented, the framework performs architecture inference in order to quickly identify a good candidate architecture, before any model is trained on the new task. At the core of our framework lies a deep value network that can predict the performance of input architectures on a task by utilizing task meta-features and the previous model training experiments performed on related tasks. We adopt a continuous parametrization of the model architecture which allows for efficient gradient-based optimization. Given a new task, an effective architecture is quickly identified by maximizing the estimated performance with respect to the model architecture parameters with simple gradient ascent. It is key to point out that our goal is to achieve reasonable performance at the lowest cost. We provide experimental results showing the effectiveness of the framework despite its high computational efficiency. …

TensorTuner
TensorFlow is a popular deep learning framework used by data scientists to solve a wide-range of machine learning and deep learning problems such as image classification and speech recognition. It also operates at a large scale and in heterogeneous environments — it allows users to train neural network models or deploy them for inference using GPUs, CPUs and deep learning specific custom-designed hardware such as TPUs. Even though TensorFlow supports a variety of optimized backends, realizing the best performance using a backend may require additional efforts. For instance, getting the best performance from a CPU backend requires careful tuning of its threading model. Unfortunately, the best tuning approach used today is manual, tedious, time-consuming, and, more importantly, may not guarantee the best performance. In this paper, we develop an automatic approach, called TensorTuner, to search for optimal parameter settings of TensorFlow’s threading model for CPU backends. We evaluate TensorTuner on both Eigen and Intel’s MKL CPU backends using a set of neural networks from TensorFlow’s benchmarking suite. Our evaluation results demonstrate that the parameter settings found by TensorTuner produce 2% to 123% performance improvement for the Eigen CPU backend and 1.5% to 28% performance improvement for the MKL CPU backend over the performance obtained using their best-known parameter settings. This highlights the fact that the default parameter settings in Eigen CPU backend are not the ideal settings; and even for a carefully hand-tuned MKL backend, the settings may be sub-optimal. Our evaluations also revealed that TensorTuner is efficient at finding the optimal settings — it is able to converge to the optimal settings quickly by pruning more than 90% of the parameter search space. …

SimpleDet
Object detection and instance recognition play a central role in many AI applications like autonomous driving, video surveillance and medical image analysis. However, training object detection models on large scale datasets remains computationally expensive and time consuming. This paper presents an efficient and open source object detection framework called SimpleDet which enables the training of state-of-the-art detection models on consumer grade hardware at large scale. SimpleDet supports up-to-date detection models with best practice. SimpleDet also supports distributed training with near linear scaling out of box. Codes, examples and documents of SimpleDet can be found at https://…/simpledet . …