Yuqing Yang

Weiquan Huang, Aoqi Wu, Yifan Yang et al.

CLIP is a foundational multimodal model that aligns image and text features into a shared representation space via contrastive learning on large-scale image-text pairs. Its effectiveness primarily stems from the use of natural language as rich supervision. Motivated by the remarkable advancements in large language models (LLMs), this work explores how LLMs' superior text understanding and extensive open-world knowledge can enhance CLIP's capability, especially for processing longer and more complex image captions. We propose an efficient post-training strategy that integrates LLMs into pretrained CLIP. To address the challenge posed by the autoregressive nature of LLMs, we introduce a caption-to-caption contrastive fine-tuning framework, significantly enhancing the discriminative quality of LLM outputs. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach outperforms LoRA-based methods, achieving nearly fourfold faster training with superior performance. Furthermore, we validate substantial improvements over state-of-the-art models such as CLIP, EVA02, and SigLip2 across various zero-shot multimodal retrieval tasks, cross-lingual retrieval tasks, and multimodal language model pretraining.

Bo Li, Xinyang Jiang, Donglin Bai et al.

The energy consumption of deep learning models is increasing at a breathtaking rate, which raises concerns due to potential negative effects on carbon neutrality in the context of global warming and climate change. With the progress of efficient deep learning techniques, e.g., model compression, researchers can obtain efficient models with fewer parameters and smaller latency. However, most of the existing efficient deep learning methods do not explicitly consider energy consumption as a key performance indicator. Furthermore, existing methods mostly focus on the inference costs of the resulting efficient models, but neglect the notable energy consumption throughout the entire life cycle of the algorithm. In this paper, we present the first large-scale energy consumption benchmark for efficient computer vision models, where a new metric is proposed to explicitly evaluate the full-cycle energy consumption under different model usage intensity. The benchmark can provide insights for low carbon emission when selecting efficient deep learning algorithms in different model usage scenarios.

Li Lyna Zhang, Yuqing Yang, Yuhang Jiang et al.

Designing accurate and efficient convolutional neural architectures for vast amount of hardware is challenging because hardware designs are complex and diverse. This paper addresses the hardware diversity challenge in Neural Architecture Search (NAS). Unlike previous approaches that apply search algorithms on a small, human-designed search space without considering hardware diversity, we propose HURRICANE that explores the automatic hardware-aware search over a much larger search space and a two-stage search algorithm, to efficiently generate tailored models for different types of hardware. Extensive experiments on ImageNet demonstrate that our algorithm outperforms state-of-the-art hardware-aware NAS methods under the same latency constraint on three types of hardware. Moreover, the discovered architectures achieve much lower latency and higher accuracy than current state-of-the-art efficient models. Remarkably, HURRICANE achieves a 76.67% top-1 accuracy on ImageNet with a inference latency of only 16.5 ms for DSP, which is a 3.47% higher accuracy and a 6.35x inference speedup than FBNet-iPhoneX, respectively. For VPU, we achieve a 0.53% higher top-1 accuracy than Proxyless-mobile with a 1.49x speedup. Even for well-studied mobile CPU, we achieve a 1.63% higher top-1 accuracy than FBNet-iPhoneX with a comparable inference latency. HURRICANE also reduces the training time by 30.4% compared to SPOS.