Daily Papers

Recently, token-based generation have demonstrated their effectiveness in image synthesis. As a representative example, non-autoregressive Transformers (NATs) can generate decent-quality images in a few steps. NATs perform generation in a progressive manner, where the latent tokens of a resulting image are incrementally revealed. At each step, the unrevealed image regions are padded with mask tokens and inferred by NAT. In this paper, we delve into the mechanisms behind the effectiveness of NATs and uncover two important patterns that naturally emerge from NATs: Spatially (within a step), although mask and visible tokens are processed uniformly by NATs, the interactions between them are highly asymmetric. In specific, mask tokens mainly gather information for decoding, while visible tokens tend to primarily provide information, and their deep representations can be built only upon themselves. Temporally (across steps), the interactions between adjacent generation steps mostly concentrate on updating the representations of a few critical tokens, while the computation for the majority of tokens is generally repetitive. Driven by these findings, we propose EfficientNAT (ENAT), a NAT model that explicitly encourages these critical interactions inherent in NATs. At the spatial level, we disentangle the computations of visible and mask tokens by encoding visible tokens independently, while decoding mask tokens conditioned on the fully encoded visible tokens. At the temporal level, we prioritize the computation of the critical tokens at each step, while maximally reusing previously computed token representations to supplement necessary information. ENAT improves the performance of NATs notably with significantly reduced computational cost. Experiments on ImageNet-256, ImageNet-512 and MS-COCO validate the effectiveness of ENAT. Code is available at https://github.com/LeapLabTHU/ENAT.

The ability to perform pixel-wise semantic segmentation in real-time is of paramount importance in mobile applications. Recent deep neural networks aimed at this task have the disadvantage of requiring a large number of floating point operations and have long run-times that hinder their usability. In this paper, we propose a novel deep neural network architecture named ENet (efficient neural network), created specifically for tasks requiring low latency operation. ENet is up to 18times faster, requires 75times less FLOPs, has 79times less parameters, and provides similar or better accuracy to existing models. We have tested it on CamVid, Cityscapes and SUN datasets and report on comparisons with existing state-of-the-art methods, and the trade-offs between accuracy and processing time of a network. We present performance measurements of the proposed architecture on embedded systems and suggest possible software improvements that could make ENet even faster.

We present EfficientViT-SAM, a new family of accelerated segment anything models. We retain SAM's lightweight prompt encoder and mask decoder while replacing the heavy image encoder with EfficientViT. For the training, we begin with the knowledge distillation from the SAM-ViT-H image encoder to EfficientViT. Subsequently, we conduct end-to-end training on the SA-1B dataset. Benefiting from EfficientViT's efficiency and capacity, EfficientViT-SAM delivers 48.9x measured TensorRT speedup on A100 GPU over SAM-ViT-H without sacrificing performance. Our code and pre-trained models are released at https://github.com/mit-han-lab/efficientvit.

We consider the prediction of the Hamiltonian matrix, which finds use in quantum chemistry and condensed matter physics. Efficiency and equivariance are two important, but conflicting factors. In this work, we propose a SE(3)-equivariant network, named QHNet, that achieves efficiency and equivariance. Our key advance lies at the innovative design of QHNet architecture, which not only obeys the underlying symmetries, but also enables the reduction of number of tensor products by 92\%. In addition, QHNet prevents the exponential growth of channel dimension when more atom types are involved. We perform experiments on MD17 datasets, including four molecular systems. Experimental results show that our QHNet can achieve comparable performance to the state of the art methods at a significantly faster speed. Besides, our QHNet consumes 50\% less memory due to its streamlined architecture. Our code is publicly available as part of the AIRS library (https://github.com/divelab/AIRS).

Efficiency is a key property to foster inclusiveness and reduce environmental costs, especially in an era of LLMs. In this work, we provide a comprehensive evaluation of efficiency for MT evaluation metrics. Our approach involves replacing computation-intensive transformers with lighter alternatives and employing linear and quadratic approximations for alignment algorithms on top of LLM representations. We evaluate six (reference-free and reference-based) metrics across three MT datasets and examine 16 lightweight transformers. In addition, we look into the training efficiency of metrics like COMET by utilizing adapters. Our results indicate that (a) TinyBERT provides the optimal balance between quality and efficiency, (b) CPU speed-ups are more substantial than those on GPU; (c) WMD approximations yield no efficiency gains while reducing quality and (d) adapters enhance training efficiency (regarding backward pass speed and memory requirements) as well as, in some cases, metric quality. These findings can help to strike a balance between evaluation speed and quality, which is essential for effective NLG systems. Furthermore, our research contributes to the ongoing efforts to optimize NLG evaluation metrics with minimal impact on performance. To our knowledge, ours is the most comprehensive analysis of different aspects of efficiency for MT metrics conducted so far.

Many mission-critical systems are based on GPU for inference. It requires not only high recognition accuracy but also low latency in responding time. Although many studies are devoted to optimizing the structure of deep models for efficient inference, most of them do not leverage the architecture of modern GPU for fast inference, leading to suboptimal performance. To address this issue, we propose a general principle for designing GPU-efficient networks based on extensive empirical studies. This design principle enables us to search for GPU-efficient network structures effectively by a simple and lightweight method as opposed to most Neural Architecture Search (NAS) methods that are complicated and computationally expensive. Based on the proposed framework, we design a family of GPU-Efficient Networks, or GENets in short. We did extensive evaluations on multiple GPU platforms and inference engines. While achieving geq 81.3% top-1 accuracy on ImageNet, GENet is up to 6.4 times faster than EfficienNet on GPU. It also outperforms most state-of-the-art models that are more efficient than EfficientNet in high precision regimes. Our source code and pre-trained models are available from https://github.com/idstcv/GPU-Efficient-Networks.

Supersized pre-trained language models have pushed the accuracy of various natural language processing (NLP) tasks to a new state-of-the-art (SOTA). Rather than pursuing the reachless SOTA accuracy, more and more researchers start paying attention on model efficiency and usability. Different from accuracy, the metric for efficiency varies across different studies, making them hard to be fairly compared. To that end, this work presents ELUE (Efficient Language Understanding Evaluation), a standard evaluation, and a public leaderboard for efficient NLP models. ELUE is dedicated to depict the Pareto Frontier for various language understanding tasks, such that it can tell whether and how much a method achieves Pareto improvement. Along with the benchmark, we also release a strong baseline, ElasticBERT, which allows BERT to exit at any layer in both static and dynamic ways. We demonstrate the ElasticBERT, despite its simplicity, outperforms or performs on par with SOTA compressed and early exiting models. With ElasticBERT, the proposed ELUE has a strong Pareto Frontier and makes a better evaluation for efficient NLP models.

Detecting anomalies in images is an important task, especially in real-time computer vision applications. In this work, we focus on computational efficiency and propose a lightweight feature extractor that processes an image in less than a millisecond on a modern GPU. We then use a student-teacher approach to detect anomalous features. We train a student network to predict the extracted features of normal, i.e., anomaly-free training images. The detection of anomalies at test time is enabled by the student failing to predict their features. We propose a training loss that hinders the student from imitating the teacher feature extractor beyond the normal images. It allows us to drastically reduce the computational cost of the student-teacher model, while improving the detection of anomalous features. We furthermore address the detection of challenging logical anomalies that involve invalid combinations of normal local features, for example, a wrong ordering of objects. We detect these anomalies by efficiently incorporating an autoencoder that analyzes images globally. We evaluate our method, called EfficientAD, on 32 datasets from three industrial anomaly detection dataset collections. EfficientAD sets new standards for both the detection and the localization of anomalies. At a latency of two milliseconds and a throughput of six hundred images per second, it enables a fast handling of anomalies. Together with its low error rate, this makes it an economical solution for real-world applications and a fruitful basis for future research.

Convolutional Neural Networks (ConvNets) are commonly developed at a fixed resource budget, and then scaled up for better accuracy if more resources are available. In this paper, we systematically study model scaling and identify that carefully balancing network depth, width, and resolution can lead to better performance. Based on this observation, we propose a new scaling method that uniformly scales all dimensions of depth/width/resolution using a simple yet highly effective compound coefficient. We demonstrate the effectiveness of this method on scaling up MobileNets and ResNet. To go even further, we use neural architecture search to design a new baseline network and scale it up to obtain a family of models, called EfficientNets, which achieve much better accuracy and efficiency than previous ConvNets. In particular, our EfficientNet-B7 achieves state-of-the-art 84.3% top-1 accuracy on ImageNet, while being 8.4x smaller and 6.1x faster on inference than the best existing ConvNet. Our EfficientNets also transfer well and achieve state-of-the-art accuracy on CIFAR-100 (91.7%), Flowers (98.8%), and 3 other transfer learning datasets, with an order of magnitude fewer parameters. Source code is at https://github.com/tensorflow/tpu/tree/master/models/official/efficientnet.

State of the art (SOTA) neural text to speech (TTS) models can generate natural-sounding synthetic voices. These models are characterized by large memory footprints and substantial number of operations due to the long-standing focus on speech quality with cloud inference in mind. Neural TTS models are generally not designed to perform standalone speech syntheses on resource-constrained and no Internet access edge devices. In this work, an efficient neural TTS called EfficientSpeech that synthesizes speech on an ARM CPU in real-time is proposed. EfficientSpeech uses a shallow non-autoregressive pyramid-structure transformer forming a U-Network. EfficientSpeech has 266k parameters and consumes 90 MFLOPS only or about 1% of the size and amount of computation in modern compact models such as Mixer-TTS. EfficientSpeech achieves an average mel generation real-time factor of 104.3 on an RPi4. Human evaluation shows only a slight degradation in audio quality as compared to FastSpeech2.

We evaluate the robustness of a Neural Architecture Search (NAS) algorithm known as Efficient NAS (ENAS) against data agnostic poisoning attacks on the original search space with carefully designed ineffective operations. We empirically demonstrate how our one shot search space poisoning approach exploits design flaws in the ENAS controller to degrade predictive performance on classification tasks. With just two poisoning operations injected into the search space, we inflate prediction error rates for child networks upto 90% on the CIFAR-10 dataset.

Few-shot classification and segmentation (FS-CS) focuses on jointly performing multi-label classification and multi-class segmentation using few annotated examples. Although the current state of the art (SOTA) achieves high accuracy in both tasks, it struggles with small objects. To overcome this, we propose the Efficient Masked Attention Transformer (EMAT), which improves classification and segmentation accuracy, especially for small objects. EMAT introduces three modifications: a novel memory-efficient masked attention mechanism, a learnable downscaling strategy, and parameter-efficiency enhancements. EMAT outperforms all FS-CS methods on the PASCAL-5^i and COCO-20^i datasets, using at least four times fewer trainable parameters. Moreover, as the current FS-CS evaluation setting discards available annotations, despite their costly collection, we introduce two novel evaluation settings that consider these annotations to better reflect practical scenarios.

Vision transformers have shown great success due to their high model capabilities. However, their remarkable performance is accompanied by heavy computation costs, which makes them unsuitable for real-time applications. In this paper, we propose a family of high-speed vision transformers named EfficientViT. We find that the speed of existing transformer models is commonly bounded by memory inefficient operations, especially the tensor reshaping and element-wise functions in MHSA. Therefore, we design a new building block with a sandwich layout, i.e., using a single memory-bound MHSA between efficient FFN layers, which improves memory efficiency while enhancing channel communication. Moreover, we discover that the attention maps share high similarities across heads, leading to computational redundancy. To address this, we present a cascaded group attention module feeding attention heads with different splits of the full feature, which not only saves computation cost but also improves attention diversity. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate EfficientViT outperforms existing efficient models, striking a good trade-off between speed and accuracy. For instance, our EfficientViT-M5 surpasses MobileNetV3-Large by 1.9% in accuracy, while getting 40.4% and 45.2% higher throughput on Nvidia V100 GPU and Intel Xeon CPU, respectively. Compared to the recent efficient model MobileViT-XXS, EfficientViT-M2 achieves 1.8% superior accuracy, while running 5.8x/3.7x faster on the GPU/CPU, and 7.4x faster when converted to ONNX format. Code and models are available at https://github.com/microsoft/Cream/tree/main/EfficientViT.

In remote sensing, most segmentation networks adopt the UNet architecture, often incorporating modules such as Transformers or Mamba to enhance global-local feature interactions within decoder stages. However, these enhancements typically focus on intra-scale relationships and neglect the global contextual dependencies across multiple resolutions. To address this limitation, we introduce the Terrace Convolutional Decoder Network (TNet), a simple yet effective architecture that leverages only convolution and addition operations to progressively integrate low-resolution features (rich in global context) into higher-resolution features (rich in local details) across decoding stages. This progressive fusion enables the model to learn spatially-aware convolutional kernels that naturally blend global and local information in a stage-wise manner. We implement TNet with a ResNet-18 encoder (TNet-R) and evaluate it on three benchmark datasets. TNet-R achieves competitive performance with a mean Intersection-over-Union (mIoU) of 85.35\% on ISPRS Vaihingen, 87.05\% on ISPRS Potsdam, and 52.19\% on LoveDA, while maintaining high computational efficiency. Code is publicly available.

Adapters have been positioned as a parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) approach, whereby a minimal number of parameters are added to the model and fine-tuned. However, adapters have not been sufficiently analyzed to understand if PEFT translates to benefits in training/deployment efficiency and maintainability/extensibility. Through extensive experiments on many adapters, tasks, and languages in supervised and cross-lingual zero-shot settings, we clearly show that for Natural Language Understanding (NLU) tasks, the parameter efficiency in adapters does not translate to efficiency gains compared to full fine-tuning of models. More precisely, adapters are relatively expensive to train and have slightly higher deployment latency. Furthermore, the maintainability/extensibility benefits of adapters can be achieved with simpler approaches like multi-task training via full fine-tuning, which also provide relatively faster training times. We, therefore, recommend that for moderately sized models for NLU tasks, practitioners should rely on full fine-tuning or multi-task training rather than using adapters. Our code is available at https://github.com/AI4Bharat/adapter-efficiency.

OpenNMT is an open-source toolkit for neural machine translation (NMT). The system prioritizes efficiency, modularity, and extensibility with the goal of supporting NMT research into model architectures, feature representations, and source modalities, while maintaining competitive performance and reasonable training requirements. The toolkit consists of modeling and translation support, as well as detailed pedagogical documentation about the underlying techniques. OpenNMT has been used in several production MT systems, modified for numerous research papers, and is implemented across several deep learning frameworks.

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, 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 MobileNetV2times 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.

The environmental impact of Artificial Intelligence (AI) is emerging as a significant global concern, particularly regarding model training. In this paper, we introduce GREEN (Guided Recommendations of Energy-Efficient Networks), a novel, inference-time approach for recommending Pareto-optimal AI model configurations that optimize validation performance and energy consumption across diverse AI domains and tasks. Our approach directly addresses the limitations of current eco-efficient neural architecture search methods, which are often restricted to specific architectures or tasks. Central to this work is EcoTaskSet, a dataset comprising training dynamics from over 1767 experiments across computer vision, natural language processing, and recommendation systems using both widely used and cutting-edge architectures. Leveraging this dataset and a prediction model, our approach demonstrates effectiveness in selecting the best model configuration based on user preferences. Experimental results show that our method successfully identifies energy-efficient configurations while ensuring competitive performance.

Despite recent progress, learning new tasks through language instructions remains an extremely challenging problem. On the ALFRED benchmark for task learning, the published state-of-the-art system only achieves a task success rate of less than 10% in an unseen environment, compared to the human performance of over 90%. To address this issue, this paper takes a closer look at task learning. In a departure from a widely applied end-to-end architecture, we decomposed task learning into three sub-problems: sub-goal planning, scene navigation, and object manipulation; and developed a model HiTUT (stands for Hierarchical Tasks via Unified Transformers) that addresses each sub-problem in a unified manner to learn a hierarchical task structure. On the ALFRED benchmark, HiTUT has achieved the best performance with a remarkably higher generalization ability. In the unseen environment, HiTUT achieves over 160% performance gain in success rate compared to the previous state of the art. The explicit representation of task structures also enables an in-depth understanding of the nature of the problem and the ability of the agent, which provides insight for future benchmark development and evaluation.

While Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning improves model performance, it incurs significant time costs due to the generation of discrete CoT tokens (DCoT). Continuous CoT (CCoT) offers a more efficient alternative, but existing CCoT methods are hampered by indirect fine-tuning, limited alignment, or inconsistent targets. To overcome these limitations, we propose SynAdapt, an innovative efficient reasoning framework. Specifically, SynAdapt generates the synthetic CCoT to serve as a precise and effective alignment target for LLMs. This synthetic CCoT explicitly guides the LLM to learn CCoT and derive accurate answers directly. Furthermore, relying solely on CCoT is insufficient for solving hard questions. To address this, SynAdapt integrates a difficulty classifier that leverages both question context and CCoT to identify hard questions. CCoT can effectively help identify hard questions after some brief reasoning. We then adaptively prompt the LLM to re-think these hard questions for improved performance. Extensive experimental results across various benchmarks from different difficulty levels strongly demonstrate the effectiveness of our method, achieving the best accuracy-efficiency trade-off.

Precise breast cancer classification on histopathological images has the potential to greatly improve the diagnosis and patient outcome in oncology. The data imbalance problem largely stems from the inherent imbalance within medical image datasets, where certain tumor subtypes may appear much less frequently. This constitutes a considerable limitation in biased model predictions that can overlook critical but rare classes. In this work, we adopted EfficientNet, a state-of-the-art convolutional neural network (CNN) model that balances high accuracy with computational cost efficiency. To address data imbalance, we introduce an intensive data augmentation pipeline and cost-sensitive learning, improving representation and ensuring that the model does not overly favor majority classes. This approach provides the ability to learn effectively from rare tumor types, improving its robustness. Additionally, we fine-tuned the model using transfer learning, where weights in the beginning trained on a binary classification task were adopted to multi-class classification, improving the capability to detect complex patterns within the BreakHis dataset. Our results underscore significant improvements in the binary classification performance, achieving an exceptional recall increase for benign cases from 0.92 to 0.95, alongside an accuracy enhancement from 97.35 % to 98.23%. Our approach improved the performance of multi-class tasks from 91.27% with regular augmentation to 94.54% with intensive augmentation, reaching 95.04% with transfer learning. This framework demonstrated substantial gains in precision in the minority classes, such as Mucinous carcinoma and Papillary carcinoma, while maintaining high recall consistently across these critical subtypes, as further confirmed by confusion matrix analysis.

Neural Architecture Search (NAS) is a laborious process. Prior work on automated NAS targets mainly on improving accuracy, but lacks consideration of computational resource use. We propose the Resource-Efficient Neural Architect (RENA), an efficient resource-constrained NAS using reinforcement learning with network embedding. RENA uses a policy network to process the network embeddings to generate new configurations. We demonstrate RENA on image recognition and keyword spotting (KWS) problems. RENA can find novel architectures that achieve high performance even with tight resource constraints. For CIFAR10, it achieves 2.95% test error when compute intensity is greater than 100 FLOPs/byte, and 3.87% test error when model size is less than 3M parameters. For Google Speech Commands Dataset, RENA achieves the state-of-the-art accuracy without resource constraints, and it outperforms the optimized architectures with tight resource constraints.

This study thoroughly investigates how well deep learning models can recognize Arabic handwritten text for person biometric identification. It compares three advanced architectures -- ResNet50, MobileNetV2, and EfficientNetB7 -- using three widely recognized datasets: AHAWP, Khatt, and LAMIS-MSHD. Results show that EfficientNetB7 outperforms the others, achieving test accuracies of 98.57\%, 99.15\%, and 99.79\% on AHAWP, Khatt, and LAMIS-MSHD datasets, respectively. EfficientNetB7's exceptional performance is credited to its innovative techniques, including compound scaling, depth-wise separable convolutions, and squeeze-and-excitation blocks. These features allow the model to extract more abstract and distinctive features from handwritten text images. The study's findings hold significant implications for enhancing identity verification and authentication systems, highlighting the potential of deep learning in Arabic handwritten text recognition for person biometric identification.

The NeuroEvolution of Augmenting Topologies (NEAT) algorithm has received considerable recognition in the field of neuroevolution. Its effectiveness is derived from initiating with simple networks and incrementally evolving both their topologies and weights. Although its capability across various challenges is evident, the algorithm's computational efficiency remains an impediment, limiting its scalability potential. To address these limitations, this paper introduces TensorNEAT, a GPU-accelerated library that applies tensorization to the NEAT algorithm. Tensorization reformulates NEAT's diverse network topologies and operations into uniformly shaped tensors, enabling efficient parallel execution across entire populations. TensorNEAT is built upon JAX, leveraging automatic function vectorization and hardware acceleration to significantly enhance computational efficiency. In addition to NEAT, the library supports variants such as CPPN and HyperNEAT, and integrates with benchmark environments like Gym, Brax, and gymnax. Experimental evaluations across various robotic control environments in Brax demonstrate that TensorNEAT delivers up to 500x speedups compared to existing implementations, such as NEAT-Python. The source code for TensorNEAT is publicly available at: https://github.com/EMI-Group/tensorneat.

Reducing inference time and energy usage while maintaining prediction accuracy has become a significant concern for deep neural networks (DNN) inference on resource-constrained edge devices. To address this problem, we propose a novel approach based on "converting" autoencoder and lightweight DNNs. This improves upon recent work such as early-exiting framework and DNN partitioning. Early-exiting frameworks spend different amounts of computation power for different input data depending upon their complexity. However, they can be inefficient in real-world scenarios that deal with many hard image samples. On the other hand, DNN partitioning algorithms that utilize the computation power of both the cloud and edge devices can be affected by network delays and intermittent connections between the cloud and the edge. We present CBNet, a low-latency and energy-efficient DNN inference framework tailored for edge devices. It utilizes a "converting" autoencoder to efficiently transform hard images into easy ones, which are subsequently processed by a lightweight DNN for inference. To the best of our knowledge, such autoencoder has not been proposed earlier. Our experimental results using three popular image-classification datasets on a Raspberry Pi 4, a Google Cloud instance, and an instance with Nvidia Tesla K80 GPU show that CBNet achieves up to 4.8x speedup in inference latency and 79% reduction in energy usage compared to competing techniques while maintaining similar or higher accuracy.

Audio tagging is an active research area and has a wide range of applications. Since the release of AudioSet, great progress has been made in advancing model performance, which mostly comes from the development of novel model architectures and attention modules. However, we find that appropriate training techniques are equally important for building audio tagging models with AudioSet, but have not received the attention they deserve. To fill the gap, in this work, we present PSLA, a collection of training techniques that can noticeably boost the model accuracy including ImageNet pretraining, balanced sampling, data augmentation, label enhancement, model aggregation and their design choices. By training an EfficientNet with these techniques, we obtain a single model (with 13.6M parameters) and an ensemble model that achieve mean average precision (mAP) scores of 0.444 and 0.474 on AudioSet, respectively, outperforming the previous best system of 0.439 with 81M parameters. In addition, our model also achieves a new state-of-the-art mAP of 0.567 on FSD50K.

Semantic segmentation enables many appealing real-world applications, such as computational photography, autonomous driving, etc. However, the vast computational cost makes deploying state-of-the-art semantic segmentation models on edge devices with limited hardware resources difficult. This work presents EfficientViT, a new family of semantic segmentation models with a novel lightweight multi-scale attention for on-device semantic segmentation. Unlike prior semantic segmentation models that rely on heavy self-attention, hardware-inefficient large-kernel convolution, or complicated topology structure to obtain good performances, our lightweight multi-scale attention achieves a global receptive field and multi-scale learning (two critical features for semantic segmentation models) with only lightweight and hardware-efficient operations. As such, EfficientViT delivers remarkable performance gains over previous state-of-the-art semantic segmentation models across popular benchmark datasets with significant speedup on the mobile platform. Without performance loss on Cityscapes, our EfficientViT provides up to 15x and 9.3x mobile latency reduction over SegFormer and SegNeXt, respectively. Maintaining the same mobile latency, EfficientViT provides +7.4 mIoU gain on ADE20K over SegNeXt. Code: https://github.com/mit-han-lab/efficientvit.

This paper describes the FBK's participation in the Simultaneous Translation Evaluation Campaign at IWSLT 2024. For this year's submission in the speech-to-text translation (ST) sub-track, we propose SimulSeamless, which is realized by combining AlignAtt and SeamlessM4T in its medium configuration. The SeamlessM4T model is used "off-the-shelf" and its simultaneous inference is enabled through the adoption of AlignAtt, a SimulST policy based on cross-attention that can be applied without any retraining or adaptation of the underlying model for the simultaneous task. We participated in all the Shared Task languages (English->{German, Japanese, Chinese}, and Czech->English), achieving acceptable or even better results compared to last year's submissions. SimulSeamless, covering more than 143 source languages and 200 target languages, is released at: https://github.com/hlt-mt/FBK-fairseq/.

In the domain of computer vision, Parameter-Efficient Tuning (PET) is increasingly replacing the traditional paradigm of pre-training followed by full fine-tuning. PET is particularly favored for its effectiveness in large foundation models, as it streamlines transfer learning costs and optimizes hardware utilization. However, the current PET methods are mainly designed for single-modal optimization. While some pioneering studies have undertaken preliminary explorations, they still remain at the level of aligned encoders (e.g., CLIP) and lack exploration of misaligned encoders. These methods show sub-optimal performance with misaligned encoders, as they fail to effectively align the multimodal features during fine-tuning. In this paper, we introduce DETRIS, a parameter-efficient tuning framework designed to enhance low-rank visual feature propagation by establishing dense interconnections between each layer and all preceding layers, which enables effective cross-modal feature interaction and adaptation to misaligned encoders. We also suggest using text adapters to improve textual features. Our simple yet efficient approach greatly surpasses state-of-the-art methods with 0.9% to 1.8% backbone parameter updates, evaluated on challenging benchmarks. Our project is available at https://github.com/jiaqihuang01/DETRIS.

ERIT is a novel multimodal dataset designed to facilitate research in a lightweight multimodal fusion. It contains text and image data collected from videos of elderly individuals reacting to various situations, as well as seven emotion labels for each data sample. Because of the use of labeled images of elderly users reacting emotionally, it is also facilitating research on emotion recognition in an underrepresented age group in machine learning visual emotion recognition. The dataset is validated through comprehensive experiments indicating its importance in neural multimodal fusion research.

This paper introduces EfficientNetV2, a new family of convolutional networks that have faster training speed and better parameter efficiency than previous models. To develop this family of models, we use a combination of training-aware neural architecture search and scaling, to jointly optimize training speed and parameter efficiency. The models were searched from the search space enriched with new ops such as Fused-MBConv. Our experiments show that EfficientNetV2 models train much faster than state-of-the-art models while being up to 6.8x smaller. Our training can be further sped up by progressively increasing the image size during training, but it often causes a drop in accuracy. To compensate for this accuracy drop, we propose to adaptively adjust regularization (e.g., dropout and data augmentation) as well, such that we can achieve both fast training and good accuracy. With progressive learning, our EfficientNetV2 significantly outperforms previous models on ImageNet and CIFAR/Cars/Flowers datasets. By pretraining on the same ImageNet21k, our EfficientNetV2 achieves 87.3% top-1 accuracy on ImageNet ILSVRC2012, outperforming the recent ViT by 2.0% accuracy while training 5x-11x faster using the same computing resources. Code will be available at https://github.com/google/automl/tree/master/efficientnetv2.

The Mini-SiTian (MST) project is a pathfinder for China's next-generation large-scale time-domain survey, SiTian, aimed at discovering variable stars, transients, and explosive events. MST generates hundreds of thousands of transient alerts every night, approximately 99\% of which are false alarms, posing a significant challenge to its scientific goals. To mitigate the impact of false positives, we propose a deep learning-based solution and systematically evaluate thirteen convolutional neural networks. The results show that ResNet achieves exceptional specificity (99.70\%), EfficientNet achieves the highest recall rate (98.68\%), and DenseNet provides balanced performance with a recall rate of 94.55\% and specificity of 98.66\%. Leveraging these complementary strengths, we developed a bagging-based ensemble classifier that integrates ResNet18, DenseNet121, and EfficientNet\_B0 using a soft voting strategy. This classifier achieved the best AUC value (0.9961) among all models, with a recall rate of 95.37\% and specificity of 99.25\%. It has now been successfully deployed in the MST real-time data processing pipeline. Validation using 5,000 practically processed samples with a classification threshold of 0.798 showed that the classifier achieved 88.31\% accuracy, 91.89\% recall rate, and 99.82\% specificity, confirming its effectiveness and robustness under real application conditions.

Customizing Convolution Neural Networks (CNN) for production use has been a challenging task for DL practitioners. This paper intends to expedite the model customization with a model hub that contains the optimized models tiered by their inference latency using Neural Architecture Search (NAS). To achieve this goal, we build a distributed NAS system to search on a novel search space that consists of prominent factors to impact latency and accuracy. Since we target GPU, we name the NAS optimized models as GPUNet, which establishes a new SOTA Pareto frontier in inference latency and accuracy. Within 1ms, GPUNet is 2x faster than EfficientNet-X and FBNetV3 with even better accuracy. We also validate GPUNet on detection tasks, and GPUNet consistently outperforms EfficientNet-X and FBNetV3 on COCO detection tasks in both latency and accuracy. All of these data validate that our NAS system is effective and generic to handle different design tasks. With this NAS system, we expand GPUNet to cover a wide range of latency targets such that DL practitioners can deploy our models directly in different scenarios.

The remarkable capabilities of Large Language Model (LLM)-driven agents have enabled sophisticated systems to tackle complex, multi-step tasks, but their escalating costs threaten scalability and accessibility. This work presents the first systematic study of the efficiency-effectiveness trade-off in modern agent systems, addressing the critical need for cost-effective designs without sacrificing performance. We investigate three key questions: (1) How much complexity do agentic tasks inherently require? (2) When do additional modules yield diminishing returns? (3) How much efficiency can be gained through the design of efficient agent frameworks? Through an empirical analysis on the GAIA benchmark, we evaluate the impact of LLM backbone selection, agent framework designs, and test-time scaling strategies. Using the cost-of-pass metric, we quantify the efficiency-performance trade-off across these dimensions. Our findings inform the development of Efficient Agents , a novel agent framework that has an optimal complexity to task requirements. Efficient Agents retains 96.7% of the performance of OWL, one leading open-source agent framework, while reducing operational costs from 0.398 to 0.228, resulting in a 28.4% improvement in cost-of-pass. Our work provides actionable insights for designing efficient, high-performing agent systems, advancing the accessibility and sustainability of AI-driven solutions.

Document-level Neural Machine Translation (DocNMT) has been proven crucial for handling discourse phenomena by introducing document-level context information. One of the most important directions is to input the whole document directly to the standard Transformer model. In this case, efficiency becomes a critical concern due to the quadratic complexity of the attention module. Existing studies either focus on the encoder part, which cannot be deployed on sequence-to-sequence generation tasks, e.g., Machine Translation (MT), or suffer from a significant performance drop. In this work, we keep the translation performance while gaining 20\% speed up by introducing extra selection layer based on lightweight attention that selects a small portion of tokens to be attended. It takes advantage of the original attention to ensure performance and dimension reduction to accelerate inference. Experimental results show that our method could achieve up to 95\% sparsity (only 5\% tokens attended) approximately, and save 93\% computation cost on the attention module compared with the original Transformer, while maintaining the performance.

We introduce MTet, the largest publicly available parallel corpus for English-Vietnamese translation. MTet consists of 4.2M high-quality training sentence pairs and a multi-domain test set refined by the Vietnamese research community. Combining with previous works on English-Vietnamese translation, we grow the existing parallel dataset to 6.2M sentence pairs. We also release the first pretrained model EnViT5 for English and Vietnamese languages. Combining both resources, our model significantly outperforms previous state-of-the-art results by up to 2 points in translation BLEU score, while being 1.6 times smaller.

We propose an efficient end-to-end convolutional neural network architecture, AclNet, for audio classification. When trained with our data augmentation and regularization, we achieved state-of-the-art performance on the ESC-50 corpus with 85:65% accuracy. Our network allows configurations such that memory and compute requirements are drastically reduced, and a tradeoff analysis of accuracy and complexity is presented. The analysis shows high accuracy at significantly reduced computational complexity compared to existing solutions. For example, a configuration with only 155k parameters and 49:3 million multiply-adds per second is 81:75%, exceeding human accuracy of 81:3%. This improved efficiency can enable always-on inference in energy-efficient platforms.

Building extraction is an essential component of study in the science of remote sensing, and applications for building extraction heavily rely on semantic segmentation of high-resolution remote sensing imagery. Semantic information extraction gap constraints in the present deep learning based approaches, however can result in inadequate segmentation outcomes. To address this issue and extract buildings with high accuracy, various efficientNet backbone based U-Net++ has been proposed in this study. The designed network, based on U-Net, can improve the sensitivity of the model by deep supervision, voluminous redesigned skip-connections and hence reducing the influence of irrelevant feature areas in the background. Various effecientNet backbone based encoders have been employed when training the network to enhance the capacity of the model to extract more relevant feature. According on the experimental findings, the suggested model significantly outperforms previous cutting-edge approaches. Among the 5 efficientNet variation Unet++ based on efficientb4 achieved the best result by scoring mean accuracy of 92.23%, mean iou of 88.32%, and mean precision of 93.2% on publicly available Massachusetts building dataset and thus showing the promises of the model for automatic building extraction from high resolution satellite images.

The increasing number of Health Care facilities in Nepal has also added up the challenges on managing health care waste (HCW). Improper segregation and disposal of HCW leads to the contamination, spreading of infectious diseases and puts a risk of waste handlers. This study benchmarks the state of the art waste classification models: ResNeXt-50, EfficientNet-B0, MobileNetV3-S, YOLOv8-n and YOLOv5-s using Stratified K-fold techniques where we use 5 folds on combined HCW data, and found that the YOLOv5-s achieved higher of 95.06% accuracy but fell short few milliseconds in inference speed with YOLOv8-n model. The EfficientNet-B0 showed promising results of 93.22% accuracy but took the highest inference time. A repetitive ANOVA was performed to see statistical significance and the best performing model (YOLOv5-s) was deployed to the web with mapped bin color using Nepal's HCW management standards for public usage. Further work on the data was suggested along with localized context.

Neural architecture search (NAS) has shown great promise in designing state-of-the-art (SOTA) models that are both accurate and efficient. Recently, two-stage NAS, e.g. BigNAS, decouples the model training and searching process and achieves remarkable search efficiency and accuracy. Two-stage NAS requires sampling from the search space during training, which directly impacts the accuracy of the final searched models. While uniform sampling has been widely used for its simplicity, it is agnostic of the model performance Pareto front, which is the main focus in the search process, and thus, misses opportunities to further improve the model accuracy. In this work, we propose AttentiveNAS that focuses on improving the sampling strategy to achieve better performance Pareto. We also propose algorithms to efficiently and effectively identify the networks on the Pareto during training. Without extra re-training or post-processing, we can simultaneously obtain a large number of networks across a wide range of FLOPs. Our discovered model family, AttentiveNAS models, achieves top-1 accuracy from 77.3% to 80.7% on ImageNet, and outperforms SOTA models, including BigNAS and Once-for-All networks. We also achieve ImageNet accuracy of 80.1% with only 491 MFLOPs. Our training code and pretrained models are available at https://github.com/facebookresearch/AttentiveNAS.

Accurate and efficient segmentation of brain tumors is critical for diagnosis, treatment planning, and monitoring in clinical practice. In this study, we present an enhanced ResUNet architecture for automatic brain tumor segmentation, integrating an EfficientNetB0 encoder, a channel attention mechanism, and an Atrous Spatial Pyramid Pooling (ASPP) module. The EfficientNetB0 encoder leverages pre-trained features to improve feature extraction efficiency, while the channel attention mechanism enhances the model's focus on tumor-relevant features. ASPP enables multiscale contextual learning, crucial for handling tumors of varying sizes and shapes. The proposed model was evaluated on two benchmark datasets: TCGA LGG and BraTS 2020. Experimental results demonstrate that our method consistently outperforms the baseline ResUNet and its EfficientNet variant, achieving Dice coefficients of 0.903 and 0.851 and HD95 scores of 9.43 and 3.54 for whole tumor and tumor core regions on the BraTS 2020 dataset, respectively. compared with state-of-the-art methods, our approach shows competitive performance, particularly in whole tumor and tumor core segmentation. These results indicate that combining a powerful encoder with attention mechanisms and ASPP can significantly enhance brain tumor segmentation performance. The proposed approach holds promise for further optimization and application in other medical image segmentation tasks.

Transformer-based visual trackers have demonstrated significant progress owing to their superior modeling capabilities. However, existing trackers are hampered by low speed, limiting their applicability on devices with limited computational power. To alleviate this problem, we propose HiT, a new family of efficient tracking models that can run at high speed on different devices while retaining high performance. The central idea of HiT is the Bridge Module, which bridges the gap between modern lightweight transformers and the tracking framework. The Bridge Module incorporates the high-level information of deep features into the shallow large-resolution features. In this way, it produces better features for the tracking head. We also propose a novel dual-image position encoding technique that simultaneously encodes the position information of both the search region and template images. The HiT model achieves promising speed with competitive performance. For instance, it runs at 61 frames per second (fps) on the Nvidia Jetson AGX edge device. Furthermore, HiT attains 64.6% AUC on the LaSOT benchmark, surpassing all previous efficient trackers.

We introduce MMBench-GUI, a hierarchical benchmark for evaluating GUI automation agents across Windows, macOS, Linux, iOS, Android, and Web platforms. It comprises four levels: GUI Content Understanding, Element Grounding, Task Automation, and Task Collaboration, covering essential skills for GUI agents. In addition, we propose a novel Efficiency-Quality Area (EQA) metric to assess GUI agent execution efficiency in online automation scenarios. Through MMBench-GUI, we identify accurate visual grounding as a critical determinant of overall task success, emphasizing the substantial benefits of modular frameworks that integrate specialized grounding modules. Furthermore, to achieve reliable GUI automation, an agent requires strong task planning and cross-platform generalization abilities, with long-context memory, a broad action space, and long-term reasoning playing a critical role. More important, task efficiency remains a critically underexplored dimension, and all models suffer from substantial inefficiencies, with excessive redundant steps even when tasks are ultimately completed. The integration of precise localization, effective planning, and early stopping strategies is indispensable to enable truly efficient and scalable GUI automation. Our benchmark code, evaluation data, and running environment will be publicly available at https://github.com/open-compass/MMBench-GUI.

The transformer model has gained widespread adoption in computer vision tasks in recent times. However, due to the quadratic time and memory complexity of self-attention, which is proportional to the number of input tokens, most existing Vision Transformers (ViTs) encounter challenges in achieving efficient performance in practical industrial deployment scenarios, such as TensorRT and CoreML, where traditional CNNs excel. Although some recent attempts have been made to design CNN-Transformer hybrid architectures to tackle this problem, their overall performance has not met expectations. To tackle these challenges, we propose an efficient hybrid ViT architecture named FMViT. This approach enhances the model's expressive power by blending high-frequency features and low-frequency features with varying frequencies, enabling it to capture both local and global information effectively. Additionally, we introduce deploy-friendly mechanisms such as Convolutional Multigroup Reparameterization (gMLP), Lightweight Multi-head Self-Attention (RLMHSA), and Convolutional Fusion Block (CFB) to further improve the model's performance and reduce computational overhead. Our experiments demonstrate that FMViT surpasses existing CNNs, ViTs, and CNNTransformer hybrid architectures in terms of latency/accuracy trade-offs for various vision tasks. On the TensorRT platform, FMViT outperforms Resnet101 by 2.5% (83.3% vs. 80.8%) in top-1 accuracy on the ImageNet dataset while maintaining similar inference latency. Moreover, FMViT achieves comparable performance with EfficientNet-B5, but with a 43% improvement in inference speed. On CoreML, FMViT outperforms MobileOne by 2.6% in top-1 accuracy on the ImageNet dataset, with inference latency comparable to MobileOne (78.5% vs. 75.9%). Our code can be found at https://github.com/tany0699/FMViT.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is accelerating the transformation of scientific research paradigms, not only enhancing research efficiency but also driving innovation. We introduce NovelSeek, a unified closed-loop multi-agent framework to conduct Autonomous Scientific Research (ASR) across various scientific research fields, enabling researchers to tackle complicated problems in these fields with unprecedented speed and precision. NovelSeek highlights three key advantages: 1) Scalability: NovelSeek has demonstrated its versatility across 12 scientific research tasks, capable of generating innovative ideas to enhance the performance of baseline code. 2) Interactivity: NovelSeek provides an interface for human expert feedback and multi-agent interaction in automated end-to-end processes, allowing for the seamless integration of domain expert knowledge. 3) Efficiency: NovelSeek has achieved promising performance gains in several scientific fields with significantly less time cost compared to human efforts. For instance, in reaction yield prediction, it increased from 27.6% to 35.4% in just 12 hours; in enhancer activity prediction, accuracy rose from 0.52 to 0.79 with only 4 hours of processing; and in 2D semantic segmentation, precision advanced from 78.8% to 81.0% in a mere 30 hours.

The superior performance of modern deep networks usually comes with a costly training procedure. This paper presents a new curriculum learning approach for the efficient training of visual backbones (e.g., vision Transformers). Our work is inspired by the inherent learning dynamics of deep networks: we experimentally show that at an earlier training stage, the model mainly learns to recognize some 'easier-to-learn' discriminative patterns within each example, e.g., the lower-frequency components of images and the original information before data augmentation. Driven by this phenomenon, we propose a curriculum where the model always leverages all the training data at each epoch, while the curriculum starts with only exposing the 'easier-to-learn' patterns of each example, and introduces gradually more difficult patterns. To implement this idea, we 1) introduce a cropping operation in the Fourier spectrum of the inputs, which enables the model to learn from only the lower-frequency components efficiently, 2) demonstrate that exposing the features of original images amounts to adopting weaker data augmentation, and 3) integrate 1) and 2) and design a curriculum learning schedule with a greedy-search algorithm. The resulting approach, EfficientTrain, is simple, general, yet surprisingly effective. As an off-the-shelf method, it reduces the wall-time training cost of a wide variety of popular models (e.g., ResNet, ConvNeXt, DeiT, PVT, Swin, and CSWin) by >1.5x on ImageNet-1K/22K without sacrificing accuracy. It is also effective for self-supervised learning (e.g., MAE). Code is available at https://github.com/LeapLabTHU/EfficientTrain.

The NeuroEvolution of Augmenting Topologies (NEAT) algorithm has received considerable recognition in the field of neuroevolution. Its effectiveness is derived from initiating with simple networks and incrementally evolving both their topologies and weights. Although its capability across various challenges is evident, the algorithm's computational efficiency remains an impediment, limiting its scalability potential. In response, this paper introduces a tensorization method for the NEAT algorithm, enabling the transformation of its diverse network topologies and associated operations into uniformly shaped tensors for computation. This advancement facilitates the execution of the NEAT algorithm in a parallelized manner across the entire population. Furthermore, we develop TensorNEAT, a library that implements the tensorized NEAT algorithm and its variants, such as CPPN and HyperNEAT. Building upon JAX, TensorNEAT promotes efficient parallel computations via automated function vectorization and hardware acceleration. Moreover, the TensorNEAT library supports various benchmark environments including Gym, Brax, and gymnax. Through evaluations across a spectrum of robotics control environments in Brax, TensorNEAT achieves up to 500x speedups compared to the existing implementations such as NEAT-Python. Source codes are available at: https://github.com/EMI-Group/tensorneat.

Tensor computations, with matrix multiplication being the primary operation, serve as the fundamental basis for data analysis, physics, machine learning, and deep learning. As the scale and complexity of data continue to grow rapidly, the demand for tensor computations has also increased significantly. To meet this demand, several research institutions have started developing dedicated hardware for tensor computations. To further improve the computational performance of tensor process units, we have reexamined the issue of computation reuse that was previously overlooked in existing architectures. As a result, we propose a novel EN-T architecture that can reduce chip area and power consumption. Furthermore, our method is compatible with existing tensor processing units. We evaluated our method on prevalent microarchitectures, the results demonstrate an average improvement in area efficiency of 8.7\%, 12.2\%, and 11.0\% for tensor computing units at computational scales of 256 GOPS, 1 TOPS, and 4 TOPS, respectively. Similarly, there were energy efficiency enhancements of 13.0\%, 17.5\%, and 15.5\%.

Adapter tuning, which updates only a few parameters, has become a mainstream method for fine-tuning pretrained language models to downstream tasks. However, it often yields subpar results in few-shot learning. AdapterFusion, which assembles pretrained adapters using composition layers tailored to specific tasks, is a possible solution but significantly increases trainable parameters and deployment costs. Despite this, our preliminary study reveals that even single adapters can outperform Adapterfusion in few-shot learning, urging us to propose \texttt{Merging Pretrained Adapters} (MerA) that efficiently incorporates pretrained adapters to a single model through model fusion. Extensive experiments on two PLMs demonstrate that MerA achieves substantial improvements compared to both single adapters and AdapterFusion. To further enhance the capacity of MerA, we also introduce a simple yet effective technique, referred to as the "same-track" setting, that merges adapters from the same track of pretraining tasks. With the implementation of the "same-track" setting, we observe even more impressive gains, surpassing the performance of both full fine-tuning and adapter tuning by a substantial margin, e.g., 3.5\% in MRPC and 5.0\% in MNLI.

The rise of convenience packaging has led to generation of enormous waste, making efficient waste sorting crucial for sustainable waste management. To address this, we developed DWaste, a computer vision-powered platform designed for real-time waste sorting on resource-constrained smartphones and edge devices, including offline functionality. We benchmarked various image classification models (EfficientNetV2S/M, ResNet50/101, MobileNet) and object detection (YOLOv8n, YOLOv11n) using a subset of our own waste data set and annotated it using the custom tool Annotated Lab. We found a clear trade-off between accuracy and resource consumption: the best classifier, EfficientNetV2S, achieved high accuracy (~ 96%) but suffered from high latency (~ 0.22s) and elevated carbon emissions. In contrast, lightweight object detection models delivered strong performance (up to 77% mAP) with ultra-fast inference (~ 0.03s) and significantly smaller model sizes (< 7MB), making them ideal for real-time, low-power use. Model quantization further maximized efficiency, substantially reducing model size and VRAM usage by up to 75%. Our work demonstrates the successful implementation of "Greener AI" models to support real-time, sustainable waste sorting on edge devices.

With the success of Vision Transformers (ViTs) in computer vision tasks, recent arts try to optimize the performance and complexity of ViTs to enable efficient deployment on mobile devices. Multiple approaches are proposed to accelerate attention mechanism, improve inefficient designs, or incorporate mobile-friendly lightweight convolutions to form hybrid architectures. However, ViT and its variants still have higher latency or considerably more parameters than lightweight CNNs, even true for the years-old MobileNet. In practice, latency and size are both crucial for efficient deployment on resource-constraint hardware. In this work, we investigate a central question, can transformer models run as fast as MobileNet and maintain a similar size? We revisit the design choices of ViTs and propose an improved supernet with low latency and high parameter efficiency. We further introduce a fine-grained joint search strategy that can find efficient architectures by optimizing latency and number of parameters simultaneously. The proposed models, EfficientFormerV2, achieve about 4% higher top-1 accuracy than MobileNetV2 and MobileNetV2times1.4 on ImageNet-1K with similar latency and parameters. We demonstrate that properly designed and optimized vision transformers can achieve high performance with MobileNet-level size and speed.

We present Condition-Aware Neural Network (CAN), a new method for adding control to image generative models. In parallel to prior conditional control methods, CAN controls the image generation process by dynamically manipulating the weight of the neural network. This is achieved by introducing a condition-aware weight generation module that generates conditional weight for convolution/linear layers based on the input condition. We test CAN on class-conditional image generation on ImageNet and text-to-image generation on COCO. CAN consistently delivers significant improvements for diffusion transformer models, including DiT and UViT. In particular, CAN combined with EfficientViT (CaT) achieves 2.78 FID on ImageNet 512x512, surpassing DiT-XL/2 while requiring 52x fewer MACs per sampling step.