Eric Hu

Devansh Arpit, Matthew Fernandez, Itai Feigenbaum et al. · salesforce, stanford

We introduce the Salesforce CausalAI Library, an open-source library for causal analysis using observational data. It supports causal discovery and causal inference for tabular and time series data, of discrete, continuous and heterogeneous types. This library includes algorithms that handle linear and non-linear causal relationships between variables, and uses multi-processing for speed-up. We also include a data generator capable of generating synthetic data with specified structural equation model for the aforementioned data formats and types, that helps users control the ground-truth causal process while investigating various algorithms. Finally, we provide a user interface (UI) that allows users to perform causal analysis on data without coding. The goal of this library is to provide a fast and flexible solution for a variety of problems in the domain of causality. This technical report describes the Salesforce CausalAI API along with its capabilities, the implementations of the supported algorithms, and experiments demonstrating their performance and speed. Our library is available at \url{https://github.com/salesforce/causalai}.

Yanyu Li, Geng Yuan, Yang Wen et al.

Vision Transformers (ViT) have shown rapid progress in computer vision tasks, achieving promising results on various benchmarks. However, due to the massive number of parameters and model design, \textit{e.g.}, attention mechanism, ViT-based models are generally times slower than lightweight convolutional networks. Therefore, the deployment of ViT for real-time applications is particularly challenging, especially on resource-constrained hardware such as mobile devices. Recent efforts try to reduce the computation complexity of ViT through network architecture search or hybrid design with MobileNet block, yet the inference speed is still unsatisfactory. This leads to an important question: can transformers run as fast as MobileNet while obtaining high performance? To answer this, we first revisit the network architecture and operators used in ViT-based models and identify inefficient designs. Then we introduce a dimension-consistent pure transformer (without MobileNet blocks) as a design paradigm. Finally, we perform latency-driven slimming to get a series of final models dubbed EfficientFormer. Extensive experiments show the superiority of EfficientFormer in performance and speed on mobile devices. Our fastest model, EfficientFormer-L1, achieves $79.2\%$ top-1 accuracy on ImageNet-1K with only $1.6$ ms inference latency on iPhone 12 (compiled with CoreML), which runs as fast as MobileNetV2$\times 1.4$ ($1.6$ ms, $74.7\%$ top-1), and our largest model, EfficientFormer-L7, obtains $83.3\%$ accuracy with only $7.0$ ms latency. Our work proves that properly designed transformers can reach extremely low latency on mobile devices while maintaining high performance.