In this task, you are given the abstract of a research paper. Your task is to generate a summary of this abstract. Your summary should not be very short, but it's better if it's not more than 30 words.
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Question: The available resolution in our visual world is extremely high, if not infinite. Existing CNNs can be applied in a fully convolutional way to images of arbitrary resolution, but as the size of the input increases, they can not capture contextual information. In addition, computational requirements scale linearly to the number of input pixels, and resources are allocated uniformly across the input, no matter how informative different image regions are. We attempt to address these problems by proposing a novel architecture that traverses an image pyramid in a top-down fashion, while it uses a hard attention mechanism to selectively process only the most informative image parts. We conduct experiments on MNIST and ImageNet datasets, and we show that our models can significantly outperform fully convolutional counterparts, when the resolution of the input is that big that the receptive field of the baselines can not adequately cover the objects of interest. Gains in performance come for less FLOPs, because of the selective processing that we follow. Furthermore, our attention mechanism makes our predictions more interpretable, and creates a trade-off between accuracy and complexity that can be tuned both during training and testing time.

Answer: We propose a novel architecture that traverses an image pyramid in a top-down fashion, while it visits only the most informative regions along the way.


Question: Federated learning, where a global model is trained by iterative parameter averaging of locally-computed updates, is a promising approach for distributed training of deep networks; it provides high communication-efficiency and privacy-preservability, which allows to fit well into decentralized data environments, e.g., mobile-cloud ecosystems. However, despite the advantages, the federated learning-based methods still have a challenge in dealing with non-IID training data of local devices (i.e., learners). In this regard, we study the effects of a variety of hyperparametric conditions under the non-IID environments, to answer important concerns in practical implementations: (i) We first investigate parameter divergence of local updates to explain performance degradation from non-IID data. The origin of the parameter divergence is also found both empirically and theoretically. (ii) We then revisit the effects of optimizers, network depth/width, and regularization techniques; our observations show that the well-known advantages of the hyperparameter optimization strategies could rather yield diminishing returns with non-IID data. (iii) We finally provide the reasons of the failure cases in a categorized way, mainly based on metrics of the parameter divergence.

Answer: We investigate the internal reasons of our observations, the diminishing effects of the well-known hyperparameter optimization methods on federated learning from decentralized non-IID data.


Question: Deep networks run with low precision operations at inference time offer power and space advantages over high precision alternatives, but need to overcome the challenge of maintaining high accuracy as precision decreases. Here, we present a method for training such networks, Learned Step Size Quantization, that achieves the highest accuracy to date on the ImageNet dataset when using models, from a variety of architectures, with weights and activations quantized to 2-, 3- or 4-bits of precision, and that can train 3-bit models that reach full precision baseline accuracy. Our approach builds upon existing methods for learning weights in quantized networks by improving how the quantizer itself is configured. Specifically, we introduce a novel means to estimate and scale the task loss gradient at each weight and activation layer's quantizer step size, such that it can be learned in conjunction with other network parameters. This approach works using different levels of precision as needed for a given system and requires only a simple modification of existing training code.

Answer:
A method for learning quantization configuration for low precision networks that achieves state of the art performance for quantized networks.