NIPS 2018

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Poster

Faster Neural Networks Straight from JPEG

Lionel Gueguen · Alex Sergeev · Ben Kadlec · Rosanne Liu · Jason Yosinski

Tue Dec 04 02:00 PM -- 04:00 PM (PST) @ Room 210 #13

in Tue Poster Session B »

The simple, elegant approach of training convolutional neural networks (CNNs) directly from RGB pixels has enjoyed overwhelming empirical success. But can more performance be squeezed out of networks by using different input representations? In this paper we propose and explore a simple idea: train CNNs directly on the blockwise discrete cosine transform (DCT) coefficients computed and available in the middle of the JPEG codec. Intuitively, when processing JPEG images using CNNs, it seems unnecessary to decompress a blockwise frequency representation to an expanded pixel representation, shuffle it from CPU to GPU, and then process it with a CNN that will learn something similar to a transform back to frequency representation in its first layers. Why not skip both steps and feed the frequency domain into the network directly? In this paper we modify \libjpeg to produce DCT coefficients directly, modify a ResNet-50 network to accommodate the differently sized and strided input, and evaluate performance on ImageNet. We find networks that are both faster and more accurate, as well as networks with about the same accuracy but 1.77x faster than ResNet-50.

Keywords: Classification · Efficient Inference Methods

[ Paper] [ Poster]

Author Information

Lionel Gueguen (UBER)

Alex Sergeev (Uber Technologies Inc,)

Ben Kadlec (Uber)

Rosanne Liu (Uber AI Labs)

Jason Yosinski (Uber AI Labs; Recursion)

Dr. Jason Yosinski is a machine learning researcher, was a founding member of Uber AI Labs, and is scientific adviser to Recursion Pharmaceuticals and several other companies. His work focuses on building more capable and more understandable AI. As scientists and engineers build increasingly powerful AI systems, the abilities of these systems increase faster than does our understanding of them, motivating much of his work on AI Neuroscience: an emerging field of study that investigates fundamental properties and behaviors of AI systems. Dr. Yosinski completed his PhD as a NASA Space Technology Research Fellow working at the Cornell Creative Machines Lab, the University of Montreal, Caltech/NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and Google DeepMind. His work on AI has been featured on NPR, Fast Company, the Economist, TEDx, XKCD, and on the BBC. Prior to his academic career, Jason cofounded two web technology companies and started a program in the Los Angeles school district that teaches students algebra via hands-on robotics. In his free time, Jason enjoys cooking, sailing, motorcycling, reading, paragliding, and sometimes pretending he's an artist.