Large datasets have been crucial to the success of deep learning models in the recent years, which keep performing better as they are trained with more labelled data. While there have been sustained efforts to make these models more data-efficient, the potential benefit of understanding the data itself, is largely untapped. Specifically, focusing on object recognition tasks, we wonder if for common benchmark datasets we can do better than random subsets of the data and find a subset that can generalize on par with the full dataset when trained on. To our knowledge, this is the first result that can find notable redundancies in CIFAR-10 and ImageNet datasets (at least 10 ). Interestingly, we observe semantic correlations between required and redundant images. We hope that our findings can motivate further research into identifying additional redundancies and exploiting them for more efficient training or data-collection.
Most recently @cite_11 attempts to find redundancies in image recognition datasets by analyzing gradient magnitudes as a measure of importance. They prioritize examples with high gradient magnitude according to a pre-trained classifier. Their method fails to find redundancies in and datasets.
@cite_11
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Modern computer vision algorithms often rely on very large training datasets. However, it is conceivable that a carefully selected subsample of the dataset is sufficient for training. In this paper, we propose a gradient-based importance measure that we use to empirically analyze relative importance of training images in four datasets of varying complexity. We find that in some cases, a small subsample is indeed sufficient for training. For other datasets, however, the relative differences in importance are negligible. These results have important implications for active learning on deep networks. Additionally, our analysis method can be used as a general tool to better understand diversity of training examples in datasets. Large-scale distributed training requires significant communication bandwidth for gradient exchange that limits the scalability of multi-node training, and requires expensive high-bandwidth network infrastructure. The situation gets even worse with distributed training on mobile devices (federated learning), which suffers from higher latency, lower throughput, and intermittent poor connections. In this paper, we find 99.9 of the gradient exchange in distributed SGD is redundant, and propose Deep Gradient Compression (DGC) to greatly reduce the communication bandwidth. To preserve accuracy during compression, DGC employs four methods: momentum correction, local gradient clipping, momentum factor masking, and warm-up training. We have applied Deep Gradient Compression to image classification, speech recognition, and language modeling with multiple datasets including Cifar10, ImageNet, Penn Treebank, and Librispeech Corpus. On these scenarios, Deep Gradient Compression achieves a gradient compression ratio from 270x to 600x without losing accuracy, cutting the gradient size of ResNet-50 from 97MB to 0.35MB, and for DeepSpeech from 488MB to 0.74MB. Deep gradient compression enables large-scale distributed training on inexpensive commodity 1Gbps Ethernet and facilitates distributed training on mobile. Training robust deep video representations has proven to be much more challenging than learning deep image representations and consequently hampered tasks like video action recognition. This is in part due to the enormous size of raw video streams, the associated amount of computation required, and the high temporal redundancy. The 'true' and interesting signal is often drowned in too much irrelevant data. Motivated by the fact that the superfluous information can be reduced by up to two orders of magnitude with video compression techniques (like H.264, HEVC, etc.), in this work, we propose to train a deep network directly on the compressed video, devoid of redundancy, rather than the traditional highly redundant RGB stream. This representation has a higher information density and we found the training to be easier. In addition, the signals in a compressed video provide free, albeit noisy, motion information. We propose novel techniques to use them effectively. Our approach is about 4.6 times faster than a state-of-the-art 3D-CNN model, 2.7 times faster than a ResNet-152, and very easy to implement. On the task of action recognition, our approach outperforms all the other methods on the UCF-101, HMDB-51, and Charades dataset. We introduce two appearance-based methods for clustering a set of images of 3D (three-dimensional) objects, acquired under varying illumination conditions, into disjoint subsets corresponding to individual objects. The first algorithm is based on the concept of illumination cones. According to the theory, the clustering problem is equivalent to finding convex polyhedral cones in the high-dimensional image space. To efficiently determine the conic structures hidden in the image data, we introduce the concept of conic affinity, which measures the likelihood of a pair of images belonging to the same underlying polyhedral cone. For the second method, we introduce another affinity measure based on image gradient comparisons. The algorithm operates directly on the image gradients by comparing the magnitudes and orientations of the image gradient at each pixel. Both methods have clear geometric motivations, and they operate directly on the images without the need for feature extraction or computation of pixel statistics. We demonstrate experimentally that both algorithms are surprisingly effective in clustering images acquired under varying illumination conditions with two large, well-known image data sets.