Asymptotic normality of maximum likelihood and its variational approximation for stochastic blockmodels

Variational methods for parameter estimation are an active research area, potentially offering computationally tractable heuristics with theoretical performance bounds. We build on recent work that applies such methods to network data, and establish asymptotic normality rates for parameter estimates of stochastic blockmodel data, by either maximum likelihood or variational estimation. The result also applies to various sub-models of the stochastic blockmodel found in the literature.Comment: Published in at http://dx.doi.org/10.1214/13-AOS1124 the Annals of Statistics (http://www.imstat.org/aos/) by the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (http://www.imstat.org

Spatial Pyramid Pooling in Deep Convolutional Networks for Visual Recognition

Existing deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs) require a fixed-size (e.g., 224x224) input image. This requirement is "artificial" and may reduce the recognition accuracy for the images or sub-images of an arbitrary size/scale. In this work, we equip the networks with another pooling strategy, "spatial pyramid pooling", to eliminate the above requirement. The new network structure, called SPP-net, can generate a fixed-length representation regardless of image size/scale. Pyramid pooling is also robust to object deformations. With these advantages, SPP-net should in general improve all CNN-based image classification methods. On the ImageNet 2012 dataset, we demonstrate that SPP-net boosts the accuracy of a variety of CNN architectures despite their different designs. On the Pascal VOC 2007 and Caltech101 datasets, SPP-net achieves state-of-the-art classification results using a single full-image representation and no fine-tuning. The power of SPP-net is also significant in object detection. Using SPP-net, we compute the feature maps from the entire image only once, and then pool features in arbitrary regions (sub-images) to generate fixed-length representations for training the detectors. This method avoids repeatedly computing the convolutional features. In processing test images, our method is 24-102x faster than the R-CNN method, while achieving better or comparable accuracy on Pascal VOC 2007. In ImageNet Large Scale Visual Recognition Challenge (ILSVRC) 2014, our methods rank #2 in object detection and #3 in image classification among all 38 teams. This manuscript also introduces the improvement made for this competition.Comment: This manuscript is the accepted version for IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence (TPAMI) 2015. See Changelo

ShuffleNet: An Extremely Efficient Convolutional Neural Network for Mobile Devices

We introduce an extremely computation-efficient CNN architecture named ShuffleNet, which is designed specially for mobile devices with very limited computing power (e.g., 10-150 MFLOPs). The new architecture utilizes two new operations, pointwise group convolution and channel shuffle, to greatly reduce computation cost while maintaining accuracy. Experiments on ImageNet classification and MS COCO object detection demonstrate the superior performance of ShuffleNet over other structures, e.g. lower top-1 error (absolute 7.8%) than recent MobileNet on ImageNet classification task, under the computation budget of 40 MFLOPs. On an ARM-based mobile device, ShuffleNet achieves ~13x actual speedup over AlexNet while maintaining comparable accuracy