A Meta-Learning Approach for Custom Model Training

Transfer-learning and meta-learning are two effective methods to apply knowledge learned from large data sources to new tasks. In few-class, few-shot target task settings (i.e. when there are only a few classes and training examples available in the target task), meta-learning approaches that optimize for future task learning have outperformed the typical transfer approach of initializing model weights from a pre-trained starting point. But as we experimentally show, meta-learning algorithms that work well in the few-class setting do not generalize well in many-shot and many-class cases. In this paper, we propose a joint training approach that combines both transfer-learning and meta-learning. Benefiting from the advantages of each, our method obtains improved generalization performance on unseen target tasks in both few- and many-class and few- and many-shot scenarios.Comment: AAAI 201

A Hardware-Friendly Algorithm for Scalable Training and Deployment of Dimensionality Reduction Models on FPGA

With ever-increasing application of machine learning models in various domains such as image classification, speech recognition and synthesis, and health care, designing efficient hardware for these models has gained a lot of popularity. While the majority of researches in this area focus on efficient deployment of machine learning models (a.k.a inference), this work concentrates on challenges of training these models in hardware. In particular, this paper presents a high-performance, scalable, reconfigurable solution for both training and deployment of different dimensionality reduction models in hardware by introducing a hardware-friendly algorithm. Compared to state-of-the-art implementations, our proposed algorithm and its hardware realization decrease resource consumption by 50\% without any degradation in accuracy

Runtime Deep Model Multiplexing for Reduced Latency and Energy Consumption Inference

We propose a learning algorithm to design a light-weight neural multiplexer that given the input and computational resource requirements, calls the model that will consume the minimum compute resources for a successful inference. Mobile devices can use the proposed algorithm to offload the hard inputs to the cloud while inferring the easy ones locally. Besides, in the large scale cloud-based intelligent applications, instead of replicating the most-accurate model, a range of small and large models can be multiplexed from depending on the input's complexity which will save the cloud's computational resources. The input complexity or hardness is determined by the number of models that can predict the correct label. For example, if no model can predict the label correctly, then the input is considered as the hardest. The proposed algorithm allows the mobile device to detect the inputs that can be processed locally and the ones that require a larger model and should be sent a cloud server. Therefore, the mobile user benefits from not only the local processing but also from an accurate model hosted on a cloud server. Our experimental results show that the proposed algorithm improves mobile's model accuracy by 8.52% which is because of those inputs that are properly selected and offloaded to the cloud server. In addition, it saves the cloud providers' compute resources by a factor of 2.85x as small models are chosen for easier inputs