Chao Zeng

Chao Zeng, Songwei Liu, Shu Yang et al.

Model compression has emerged as a mainstream solution to reduce memory usage and computational overhead. This paper presents Group Quantization and Sparse Acceleration (GQSA), a novel compression technique tailored for LLMs. Traditional methods typically focus exclusively on either quantization or sparsification, but relying on a single strategy often results in significant performance loss at high compression rates. In contrast, GQSA integrates quantization and sparsification in a tightly coupled manner, leveraging GPU-friendly structured group sparsity and quantization for efficient acceleration. Building upon system-algorithm co-design principles, we propose a two-stage sparse optimization strategy that ensures the performance superiority of the compressed model. On the engine side, we introduce a "task-centric" parallel strategy, which, to the best of our knowledge, is the first application in the domain of sparse computing. Compared to the traditional 2:4 sparse method, the GQSA offers a more flexible and adjustable sparsity rate, as well as a higher weight compression rate, and is efficiently compatible with weight-only quantization methods. Experimental results demonstrate that, under the GQSA W4S50% compression setting, the model's accuracy surpasses that of both 2:4 pruning and W2 quantization. Furthermore, at the inference level, GQSA outperforms W2 by 1.26$\times$ and 2:4 pruning by 2.35$\times$ in terms of speed.

Chao Zeng, Sam Kwong

Objective image quality evaluation is a challenging task, which aims to measure the quality of a given image automatically. According to the availability of the reference images, there are Full-Reference and No-Reference IQA tasks, respectively. Most deep learning approaches use regression from deep features extracted by Convolutional Neural Networks. For the FR task, another option is conducting a statistical comparison on deep features. For all these methods, non-local information is usually neglected. In addition, the relationship between FR and NR tasks is less explored. Motivated by the recent success of transformers in modeling contextual information, we propose a unified IQA framework that utilizes CNN backbone and transformer encoder to extract features. The proposed framework is compatible with both FR and NR modes and allows for a joint training scheme. Evaluation experiments on three standard IQA datasets, i.e., LIVE, CSIQ and TID2013, and KONIQ-10K, show that our proposed model can achieve state-of-the-art FR performance. In addition, comparable NR performance is achieved in extensive experiments, and the results show that the NR performance can be leveraged by the joint training scheme.

Chao Zeng, Tiesong Zhao, Sam Kwong

Automatically evaluating the quality of image captions can be very challenging since human language is quite flexible that there can be various expressions for the same meaning. Most of the current captioning metrics rely on token level matching between candidate caption and the ground truth label sentences. It usually neglects the sentence-level information. Motivated by the auto-encoder mechanism and contrastive representation learning advances, we propose a learning-based metric for image captioning, which we call Intrinsic Image Captioning Evaluation($I^2CE$). We develop three progressive model structures to learn the sentence level representations--single branch model, dual branches model, and triple branches model. Our empirical tests show that $I^2CE$ trained with dual branches structure achieves better consistency with human judgments to contemporary image captioning evaluation metrics. Furthermore, We select several state-of-the-art image captioning models and test their performances on the MS COCO dataset concerning both contemporary metrics and the proposed $I^2CE$. Experiment results show that our proposed method can align well with the scores generated from other contemporary metrics. On this concern, the proposed metric could serve as a novel indicator of the intrinsic information between captions, which may be complementary to the existing ones.

Chao Zeng, Sam Kwong

The image captioning task is about to generate suitable descriptions from images. For this task there can be several challenges such as accuracy, fluency and diversity. However there are few metrics that can cover all these properties while evaluating results of captioning models.In this paper we first conduct a comprehensive investigation on contemporary metrics. Motivated by the auto-encoder mechanism and the research advances of word embeddings we propose a learning based metrics for image captioning, which we call Intrinsic Image Captioning Evaluation(I2CE). We select several state-of-the-art image captioning models and test their performances on MS COCO dataset with respects to both contemporary metrics and the proposed I2CE. Experiment results show that our proposed method can keep robust performance and give more flexible scores to candidate captions when encountered with semantic similar expression or less aligned semantics. On this concern the proposed metric could serve as a novel indicator on the intrinsic information between captions, which may be complementary to the existing ones.