Stochastic Stratified Average Gradient (SSAG)
SGD (Stochastic Gradient Descent) is a popular algorithm for large scale optimization problems due to its low iterative cost. However, SGD can not achieve linear convergence rate as FGD (Full Gradient Descent) because of the inherent gradient variance. To attack the problem, mini-batch SGD was proposed to get a trade-off in terms of convergence rate and iteration cost. In this paper, a general CVI (Convergence-Variance Inequality) equation is presented to state formally the interaction of convergence rate and gradient variance. Then a novel algorithm named SSAG (Stochastic Stratified Average Gradient) is introduced to reduce gradient variance based on two techniques, stratified sampling and averaging over iterations that is a key idea in SAG (Stochastic Average Gradient). Furthermore, SSAG can achieve linear convergence rate of $\mathcal {O}((1-\frac{\mu}{8CL})^k)$ at smaller storage and iterative costs, where $C\geq 2$ is the category number of training data. This convergence rate depends mainly on the variance between classes, but not on the variance within the classes. In the case of $C\ll N$ ($N$ is the training data size), SSAG’s convergence rate is much better than SAG’s convergence rate of $\mathcal {O}((1-\frac{\mu}{8NL})^k)$. Our experimental results show SSAG outperforms SAG and many other algorithms. …

BitSplit-Net
Significant computational cost and memory requirements for deep neural networks (DNNs) make it difficult to utilize DNNs in resource-constrained environments. Binary neural network (BNN), which uses binary weights and binary activations, has been gaining interests for its hardware-friendly characteristics and minimal resource requirement. However, BNN usually suffers from accuracy degradation. In this paper, we introduce ‘BitSplit-Net’, a neural network which maintains the hardware-friendly characteristics of BNN while improving accuracy by using multi-bit precision. In BitSplit-Net, each bit of multi-bit activations propagates independently throughout the network before being merged at the end of the network. Thus, each bit path of the BitSplit-Net resembles BNN and hardware friendly features of BNN, such as bitwise binary activation function, are preserved in our scheme. We demonstrate that the BitSplit version of LeNet-5, VGG-9, AlexNet, and ResNet-18 can be trained to have similar classification accuracy at a lower computational cost compared to conventional multi-bit networks with low bit precision (<= 4-bit). We further evaluate BitSplit-Net on GPU with custom CUDA kernel, showing that BitSplit-Net can achieve better hardware performance in comparison to conventional multi-bit networks. …

Vehicle Transfer Generative Adversarial Network (VTGAN)
Vehicle re-identification (reID) is to identify a target vehicle in different cameras with non-overlapping views. When deploy the well-trained model to a new dataset directly, there is a severe performance drop because of differences among datasets named domain bias. To address this problem, this paper proposes an domain adaptation framework which contains an image-to-image translation network named vehicle transfer generative adversarial network (VTGAN) and an attention-based feature learning network (ATTNet). VTGAN could make images from the source domain (well-labeled) have the style of target domain (unlabeled) and preserve identity information of source domain. To further improve the domain adaptation ability for various backgrounds, ATTNet is proposed to train generated images with the attention structure for vehicle reID. Comprehensive experimental results clearly demonstrate that our method achieves excellent performance on VehicleID dataset. …

Condition Monitoring (CM)
Condition monitoring (or, colloquially, CM) is the process of monitoring a parameter of condition in machinery (vibration, temperature etc.), in order to identify a significant change which is indicative of a developing fault. It is a major component of ➘ “Predictive Maintenance”. The use of condition monitoring allows maintenance to be scheduled, or other actions to be taken to prevent failure and avoid its consequences. Condition monitoring has a unique benefit in that conditions that would shorten normal lifespan can be addressed before they develop into a major failure. Condition monitoring techniques are normally used on rotating equipment and other machinery (pumps, electric motors, internal combustion engines, presses), while periodic inspection using non-destructive testing techniques and fit for service (FFS) evaluation are used for stationary plant equipment such as steam boilers, piping and heat exchangers.
http://…/9781466584051 …