Ning Xu

Linfeng Zhang, Xin Chen, Xiaobing Tu et al.

Remarkable achievements have been attained with Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) in image-to-image translation. However, due to a tremendous amount of parameters, state-of-the-art GANs usually suffer from low efficiency and bulky memory usage. To tackle this challenge, firstly, this paper investigates GANs performance from a frequency perspective. The results show that GANs, especially small GANs lack the ability to generate high-quality high frequency information. To address this problem, we propose a novel knowledge distillation method referred to as wavelet knowledge distillation. Instead of directly distilling the generated images of teachers, wavelet knowledge distillation first decomposes the images into different frequency bands with discrete wavelet transformation and then only distills the high frequency bands. As a result, the student GAN can pay more attention to its learning on high frequency bands. Experiments demonstrate that our method leads to 7.08 times compression and 6.80 times acceleration on CycleGAN with almost no performance drop. Additionally, we have studied the relation between discriminators and generators which shows that the compression of discriminators can promote the performance of compressed generators.

Xinyan Meng, Huabin Cheng, Rujie Chen et al.

The state-of-the-art researches indicate that analytic algorithms are promising in handling complex floorplanning scenarios. However, it is challenging to generate compact floorplans with excellent wirelength optimization effect due to the local convergence of gradient-based optimization algorithms designed for constructed smooth optimization models. Accordingly, we propose to construct a nonsmooth analytic floorplanning model addressed by the conjugate subgradient algorithm (CSA), which is accelerated by a population-based scheme adaptively regulating the stepsize with the assistance of Q-learning. In this way, the proposed CSA assisted by Q-learning (CSAQ) can strike a good balance on exploration and exploitation. Experimental results on the MCNC and GSRC benchmarks demonstrate that the proposed fixed-outline floorplanning algorithm based on CSAQ (CSF) not only address global floorplanning effectively, but also get legal floorplans more efficiently than the constraint graph-based legalization algorithm as well as its improved variants. It is also demonstrated that the CSF is competitive to the state-of-the-art algorithms on floorplanning scenarios only containing hard modules.

Ning Xu, Timothy C. G. Fisher

We propose a new variable selection algorithm, subsample-ordered least-angle regression (solar), and its coordinate descent generalization, solar-cd. Solar re-constructs lasso paths using the $L_0$ norm and averages the resulting solution paths across subsamples. Path averaging retains the ranking information of the informative variables while averaging out sensitivity to high dimensionality, improving variable selection stability, efficiency, and accuracy. We prove that: (i) with a high probability, path averaging perfectly separates informative variables from redundant variables on the average $L_0$ path; (ii) solar variable selection is consistent and accurate; and (iii) the probability that solar omits weak signals is controllable for finite sample size. We also demonstrate that: (i) solar yields, with less than $1/3$ of the lasso computation load, substantial improvements over lasso in terms of the sparsity (64-84\% reduction in redundant variable selection) and accuracy of variable selection; (ii) compared with the lasso safe/strong rule and variable screening, solar largely avoids selection of redundant variables and rejection of informative variables in the presence of complicated dependence structures; (iii) the sparsity and stability of solar conserves residual degrees of freedom for data-splitting hypothesis testing, improving the accuracy of post-selection inference on weak signals with limited $n$; (iv) replacing lasso with solar in bootstrap selection (e.g., bolasso or stability selection) produces a multi-layer variable ranking scheme that improves selection sparsity and ranking accuracy with the computation load of only one lasso realization; and (v) given the computation resources, solar bootstrap selection is substantially faster (98\% lower computation time) than the theoretical maximum speedup for parallelized bootstrap lasso (confirmed by Amdahl's law).