Feng Liang

Jieru Zhao, Tingyuan Liang, Liang Feng et al.

Fast and accurate depth estimation, or stereo matching, is essential in embedded stereo vision systems, requiring substantial design effort to achieve an appropriate balance among accuracy, speed and hardware cost. To reduce the design effort and achieve the right balance, we propose FP-Stereo for building high-performance stereo matching pipelines on FPGAs automatically. FP-Stereo consists of an open-source hardware-efficient library, allowing designers to obtain the desired implementation instantly. Diverse methods are supported in our library for each stage of the stereo matching pipeline and a series of techniques are developed to exploit the parallelism and reduce the resource overhead. To improve the usability, FP-Stereo can generate synthesizable C code of the FPGA accelerator with our optimized HLS templates automatically. To guide users for the right design choice meeting specific application requirements, detailed comparisons are performed on various configurations of our library to investigate the accuracy/speed/cost trade-off. Experimental results also show that FP-Stereo outperforms the state-of-the-art FPGA design from all aspects, including 6.08% lower error, 2x faster speed, 30% less resource usage and 40% less energy consumption. Compared to GPU designs, FP-Stereo achieves the same accuracy at a competitive speed while consuming much less energy.

Yong Zhang, Feng Liang, Guanghu Yuan et al.

Federated learning (FL) enables collaborative training of a global model in the centralized server with data from multiple parties while preserving privacy. However, data heterogeneity can significantly degrade the performance of the global model when each party uses datasets from different sources to train a local model, thereby affecting personalized local models. Among various cases of data heterogeneity, feature drift, feature space difference among parties, is prevalent in real-life data but remains largely unexplored. Feature drift can distract feature extraction learning in clients and thus lead to poor feature extraction and classification performance. To tackle the problem of feature drift in FL, we propose FedPall, an FL framework that utilizes prototype-based adversarial learning to unify feature spaces and collaborative learning to reinforce class information within the features. Moreover, FedPall leverages mixed features generated from global prototypes and local features to enhance the global classifier with classification-relevant information from a global perspective. Evaluation results on three representative feature-drifted datasets demonstrate FedPall's consistently superior performance in classification with feature-drifted data in the FL scenario.

Wenqi Jiang, Zhenhao He, Shuai Zhang et al.

Deep neural networks are widely used in personalized recommendation systems. Unlike regular DNN inference workloads, recommendation inference is memory-bound due to the many random memory accesses needed to lookup the embedding tables. The inference is also heavily constrained in terms of latency because producing a recommendation for a user must be done in about tens of milliseconds. In this paper, we propose MicroRec, a high-performance inference engine for recommendation systems. MicroRec accelerates recommendation inference by (1) redesigning the data structures involved in the embeddings to reduce the number of lookups needed and (2) taking advantage of the availability of High-Bandwidth Memory (HBM) in FPGA accelerators to tackle the latency by enabling parallel lookups. We have implemented the resulting design on an FPGA board including the embedding lookup step as well as the complete inference process. Compared to the optimized CPU baseline (16 vCPU, AVX2-enabled), MicroRec achieves 13.8~14.7x speedup on embedding lookup alone and 2.5$~5.4x speedup for the entire recommendation inference in terms of throughput. As for latency, CPU-based engines needs milliseconds for inferring a recommendation while MicroRec only takes microseconds, a significant advantage in real-time recommendation systems.

Lingrui Gan, Naveen N. Narisetty, Feng Liang

We consider a Bayesian framework for estimating a high-dimensional sparse precision matrix, in which adaptive shrinkage and sparsity are induced by a mixture of Laplace priors. Besides discussing our formulation from the Bayesian standpoint, we investigate the MAP (maximum a posteriori) estimator from a penalized likelihood perspective that gives rise to a new non-convex penalty approximating the $\ell_0$ penalty. Optimal error rates for estimation consistency in terms of various matrix norms along with selection consistency for sparse structure recovery are shown for the unique MAP estimator under mild conditions. For fast and efficient computation, an EM algorithm is proposed to compute the MAP estimator of the precision matrix and (approximate) posterior probabilities on the edges of the underlying sparse structure. Through extensive simulation studies and a real application to a call center data, we have demonstrated the fine performance of our method compared with existing alternatives.

Yingzhen Yang, Feng Liang, Nebojsa Jojic et al.

Similarity-based clustering and semi-supervised learning methods separate the data into clusters or classes according to the pairwise similarity between the data, and the pairwise similarity is crucial for their performance. In this paper, we propose a novel discriminative similarity learning framework which learns discriminative similarity for either data clustering or semi-supervised learning. The proposed framework learns classifier from each hypothetical labeling, and searches for the optimal labeling by minimizing the generalization error of the learned classifiers associated with the hypothetical labeling. Kernel classifier is employed in our framework. By generalization analysis via Rademacher complexity, the generalization error bound for the kernel classifier learned from hypothetical labeling is expressed as the sum of pairwise similarity between the data from different classes, parameterized by the weights of the kernel classifier. Such pairwise similarity serves as the discriminative similarity for the purpose of clustering and semi-supervised learning, and discriminative similarity with similar form can also be induced by the integrated squared error bound for kernel density classification. Based on the discriminative similarity induced by the kernel classifier, we propose new clustering and semi-supervised learning methods.

James Ridgway, Pierre Alquier, Nicolas Chopin et al.

We develop a scoring and classification procedure based on the PAC-Bayesian approach and the AUC (Area Under Curve) criterion. We focus initially on the class of linear score functions. We derive PAC-Bayesian non-asymptotic bounds for two types of prior for the score parameters: a Gaussian prior, and a spike-and-slab prior; the latter makes it possible to perform feature selection. One important advantage of our approach is that it is amenable to powerful Bayesian computational tools. We derive in particular a Sequential Monte Carlo algorithm, as an efficient method which may be used as a gold standard, and an Expectation-Propagation algorithm, as a much faster but approximate method. We also extend our method to a class of non-linear score functions, essentially leading to a nonparametric procedure, by considering a Gaussian process prior.