After the tremendous success of convolutional neural networks in image classification, object detection, speech recognition, etc., there is now rising demand for deployment of these compute-intensive ML models on tightly power constrained embedded and mobile systems at low cost as well as for pushing the throughput in data centers. This has triggered a wave of research towards specialized hardware accelerators. Their performance is often constrained by I O bandwidth and the energy consumption is dominated by I O transfers to off-chip memory. We introduce and evaluate a novel, hardware-friendly compression scheme for the feature maps present within convolutional neural networks. We show that an average compression ratio of 4.4× relative to uncompressed data and a gain of 60 over existing method can be achieved for ResNet-34 with a compression block requiring <300 bit of sequential cells and minimal combinational logic.
For this work, we build on a method known in the area of texture compression for GPUs, @cite_27 , fuse it with sparsity-focused compression methods, and evaluate the resulting compression algorithm on intermediate feature maps to show compression ratios of 4.4 and 2.8 for 8 ,bit AlexNet and SqueezeNet, respectively.
@cite_27
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Weight pruning methods of deep neural networks have been demonstrated to achieve a good model pruning ratio without loss of accuracy, thereby alleviating the significant computation storage requirements of large-scale DNNs. Structured weight pruning methods have been proposed to overcome the limitation of irregular network structure and demonstrated actual GPU acceleration. However, the pruning ratio and GPU acceleration are limited when accuracy needs to be maintained. In this work, we overcome pruning ratio and GPU acceleration limitations by proposing a unified, systematic framework of structured weight pruning for DNNs, named ADAM-ADMM. It is a framework that can be used to induce different types of structured sparsity, such as filter-wise, channel-wise, and shape-wise sparsity, as well non-structured sparsity. The proposed framework incorporates stochastic gradient descent with ADMM, and can be understood as a dynamic regularization method in which the regularization target is analytically updated in each iteration. A significant improvement in structured weight pruning ratio is achieved without loss of accuracy, along with fast convergence rate. With a small sparsity degree of 33.3 on the convolutional layers, we achieve 1.64 accuracy enhancement for the AlexNet model. This is obtained by mitigation of overfitting. Without loss of accuracy on the AlexNet model, we achieve 2.58x and 3.65x average measured speedup on two GPUs, clearly outperforming the prior work. The average speedups reach 2.77x and 7.5x when allowing a moderate accuracy loss of 2 . In this case the model compression for convolutional layers is 13.2x, corresponding to 10.5x CPU speedup. Our experiments on ResNet model and on other datasets like UCF101 and CIFAR-10 demonstrate the consistently higher performance of our framework. Our models and codes are released at this https URL We present a Multi View Stereo approach for huge unstructured image datasets that can deal with large variations in surface sampling rate of single images. Our method reconstructs surface parts always in the best available resolution. It considers scaling not only for large scale differences, but also between arbitrary small ones for a weighted merging of the best partial reconstructions. We create depth maps with our GPU based depth map algorithm, that also performs normal optimization. It matches several images that are found with a heuristic image selection method, to a reference image. We remove outliers by comparing depth maps against each other with a fast but reliable GPU approach. Then, we merge the different reconstructions from depth maps in 3D space by selecting the best points and optimizing them with not selected points. Finally, we create the surface by using a Delaunay graph cut. We present a new geometry compression method for animations, which is based on the clustered principal component analysis (CPCA). Instead of analyzing the set of vertices for each frame, our method analyzes the set of paths for all vertices for a certain animation length. Thus, using a data-driven approach, it can identify mesh parts, that are "coherent" over time. This usually leads to a very efficient and robust segmentation of the mesh into meaningful clusters, e.g. the wings of a chicken. These parts are then compressed separately using standard principal component analysis (PCA). Each of this clusters can be compressed more efficiently with lesser PCA components compared to previous approaches. Results show, that the new method outperforms other compression schemes like pure PCA based compression or combinations with linear prediction coding, while maintaining a better reconstruction error. This is true, even if the components and weights are quantized before transmission. The reconstruction process is very simple and can be performed directly on the GPU. We propose a new approach to efficiently render large volumetric data sets. The system achieves interactive to real-time rendering performance for several billion voxels. Our solution is based on an adaptive data representation depending on the current view and occlusion information, coupled to an efficient ray-casting rendering algorithm. One key element of our method is to guide data production and streaming directly based on information extracted during rendering. Our data structure exploits the fact that in CG scenes, details are often concentrated on the interface between free space and clusters of density and shows that volumetric models might become a valuable alternative as a rendering primitive for real-time applications. In this spirit, we allow a quality performance trade-off and exploit temporal coherence. We also introduce a mipmapping-like process that allows for an increased display rate and better quality through high quality filtering. To further enrich the data set, we create additional details through a variety of procedural methods. We demonstrate our approach in several scenarios, like the exploration of a 3D scan (81923 resolution), of hypertextured meshes (163843 virtual resolution), or of a fractal (theoretically infinite resolution). All examples are rendered on current generation hardware at 20--90 fps and respect the limited GPU memory budget.