Vision Transformer (ViT) has emerged as a competitive alternative to convolutional neural networks for various computer vision applications. Specifically, ViT multi-head attention layers make it possible to embed information globally across the overall image. Nevertheless, computing and storing such attention matrices incurs a quadratic cost dependency on the number of patches, limiting its achievable efficiency and scalability and prohibiting more extensive real-world ViT applications on resource-constrained devices. Sparse attention has been shown to be a promising direction for improving hardware acceleration efficiency for NLP models. However, a systematic counterpart approach is still missing for accelerating ViT models. To close the above gap, we propose a first-of-its-kind algorithm-hardware codesigned framework, dubbed ViTALiTy, for boosting the inference efficiency of ViTs. Unlike sparsity-based Transformer accelerators for NLP, ViTALiTy unifies both low-rank and sparse components of the attention in ViTs. At the algorithm level, we approximate the dot-product softmax operation via first-order Taylor attention with row-mean centering as the low-rank component to linearize the cost of attention blocks and further boost the accuracy by incorporating a sparsity-based regularization. At the hardware level, we develop a dedicated accelerator to better leverage the resulting workload and pipeline from ViTALiTy's linear Taylor attention which requires the execution of only the low-rank component, to further boost the hardware efficiency. Extensive experiments and ablation studies validate that ViTALiTy offers boosted end-to-end efficiency (e.g., $3\times$ faster and $3\times$ energy-efficient) under comparable accuracy, with respect to the state-of-the-art solution.

Multiplication is arguably the most cost-dominant operation in modern deep neural networks (DNNs), limiting their achievable efficiency and thus more extensive deployment in resource-constrained applications. To tackle this limitation, pioneering works have developed handcrafted multiplication-free DNNs, which require expert knowledge and time-consuming manual iteration, calling for fast development tools. To this end, we propose a Neural Architecture Search and Acceleration framework dubbed NASA, which enables automated multiplication-reduced DNN development and integrates a dedicated multiplication-reduced accelerator for boosting DNNs' achievable efficiency. Specifically, NASA adopts neural architecture search (NAS) spaces that augment the state-of-the-art one with hardware-inspired multiplication-free operators, such as shift and adder, armed with a novel progressive pretrain strategy (PGP) together with customized training recipes to automatically search for optimal multiplication-reduced DNNs; On top of that, NASA further develops a dedicated accelerator, which advocates a chunk-based template and auto-mapper dedicated for NASA-NAS resulting DNNs to better leverage their algorithmic properties for boosting hardware efficiency. Experimental results and ablation studies consistently validate the advantages of NASA's algorithm-hardware co-design framework in terms of achievable accuracy and efficiency tradeoffs. Codes are available at https://github.com/GATECH-EIC/NASA.

Vision Transformers (ViTs) have achieved state-of-the-art performance on various vision tasks. However, ViTs' self-attention module is still arguably a major bottleneck, limiting their achievable hardware efficiency. Meanwhile, existing accelerators dedicated to NLP Transformers are not optimal for ViTs. This is because there is a large difference between ViTs and NLP Transformers: ViTs have a relatively fixed number of input tokens, whose attention maps can be pruned by up to 90% even with fixed sparse patterns; while NLP Transformers need to handle input sequences of varying numbers of tokens and rely on on-the-fly predictions of dynamic sparse attention patterns for each input to achieve a decent sparsity (e.g., >=50%). To this end, we propose a dedicated algorithm and accelerator co-design framework dubbed ViTCoD for accelerating ViTs. Specifically, on the algorithm level, ViTCoD prunes and polarizes the attention maps to have either denser or sparser fixed patterns for regularizing two levels of workloads without hurting the accuracy, largely reducing the attention computations while leaving room for alleviating the remaining dominant data movements; on top of that, we further integrate a lightweight and learnable auto-encoder module to enable trading the dominant high-cost data movements for lower-cost computations. On the hardware level, we develop a dedicated accelerator to simultaneously coordinate the enforced denser/sparser workloads and encoder/decoder engines for boosted hardware utilization. Extensive experiments and ablation studies validate that ViTCoD largely reduces the dominant data movement costs, achieving speedups of up to 235.3x, 142.9x, 86.0x, 10.1x, and 6.8x over general computing platforms CPUs, EdgeGPUs, GPUs, and prior-art Transformer accelerators SpAtten and Sanger under an attention sparsity of 90%, respectively.

具有密集乘法的神经网络（NNS）（例如，卷积和变形金刚）具有饥饿的能力，阻碍了它们更广泛的部署到资源受限的设备中。因此，遵循节能硬件实施的共同实践的无乘法网络，以更有效的运算符（例如，位移位和加法）参数化NN，并引起了人们的关注。但是，从实现的准确性方面，无乘法网络的表现不足。为此，这项工作倡导混合NN，包括强大但昂贵的乘法和有效而强大的运营商来嫁给两全其美的运营商，并提出了ShiftAddnas，它们可以自动寻找更准确，更有效的NN。我们的ShiftAddnas突出了两个推动者。具体而言，它集成了（1）第一个混合搜索空间，该空间同时结合了基于乘法的和无乘法的运算符，以促进精确和有效的混合NNS的开发； （2）一种新型的重量共享策略，可以在遵循异质分布的不同操作员之间有效分享（例如，用于卷积的高斯与添加操作员的拉普拉斯人），并同时导致超级降低的超网尺寸和更好的搜索网络。对各种模型，数据集和任务的广泛实验和消融研究始终如一地验证了ShiftAddnas的功效，例如，与最先进的NN相比，获得的精度高达 +4.7％，或者+4.9更好的BLEU得分，而BLEU得分更好最多可提供93％或69％的能源和延迟节省。可以在https://github.com/rice-eic/shiftaddnas上获得代码和预估计的模型。

在本文中，我们研究了在深网（DNS）中修剪的重要性，以及（1）修剪高度参数的DNS之间的Yin＆Yang关系，这些DNS已从随机初始化训练，并且（2）培训“巧妙”的小型DNS，这些DNS已“巧妙”。初始化。在大多数情况下，从业者只能诉诸随机初始化，因此强烈需要对DN修剪建立扎实的理解。当前的文献在很大程度上仍然是经验的，缺乏对修剪如何影响DNS决策边界，如何解释修剪以及如何设计相应的原则修剪技术的理论理解。为了解决这些问题，我们建议在连续分段仿射（CPA）DNS的理论分析中采用最新进展。从这个角度来看，我们将能够检测到早期的鸟类（EB）票务现象，为当前的修剪技术提供可解释性，并制定有原则的修剪策略。在研究的每个步骤中，我们进行了广泛的实验，以支持我们的主张和结果；尽管我们的主要目标是增强对DN修剪的当前理解，而不是开发一种新的修剪方法，但我们的样条修剪标准在层和全球修剪方面与先进的修剪方法相当甚至超过了。

The development of social media user stance detection and bot detection methods rely heavily on large-scale and high-quality benchmarks. However, in addition to low annotation quality, existing benchmarks generally have incomplete user relationships, suppressing graph-based account detection research. To address these issues, we propose a Multi-Relational Graph-Based Twitter Account Detection Benchmark (MGTAB), the first standardized graph-based benchmark for account detection. To our knowledge, MGTAB was built based on the largest original data in the field, with over 1.55 million users and 130 million tweets. MGTAB contains 10,199 expert-annotated users and 7 types of relationships, ensuring high-quality annotation and diversified relations. In MGTAB, we extracted the 20 user property features with the greatest information gain and user tweet features as the user features. In addition, we performed a thorough evaluation of MGTAB and other public datasets. Our experiments found that graph-based approaches are generally more effective than feature-based approaches and perform better when introducing multiple relations. By analyzing experiment results, we identify effective approaches for account detection and provide potential future research directions in this field. Our benchmark and standardized evaluation procedures are freely available at: https://github.com/GraphDetec/MGTAB.

Image Virtual try-on aims at replacing the cloth on a personal image with a garment image (in-shop clothes), which has attracted increasing attention from the multimedia and computer vision communities. Prior methods successfully preserve the character of clothing images, however, occlusion remains a pernicious effect for realistic virtual try-on. In this work, we first present a comprehensive analysis of the occlusions and categorize them into two aspects: i) Inherent-Occlusion: the ghost of the former cloth still exists in the try-on image; ii) Acquired-Occlusion: the target cloth warps to the unreasonable body part. Based on the in-depth analysis, we find that the occlusions can be simulated by a novel semantically-guided mixup module, which can generate semantic-specific occluded images that work together with the try-on images to facilitate training a de-occlusion try-on (DOC-VTON) framework. Specifically, DOC-VTON first conducts a sharpened semantic parsing on the try-on person. Aided by semantics guidance and pose prior, various complexities of texture are selectively blending with human parts in a copy-and-paste manner. Then, the Generative Module (GM) is utilized to take charge of synthesizing the final try-on image and learning to de-occlusion jointly. In comparison to the state-of-the-art methods, DOC-VTON achieves better perceptual quality by reducing occlusion effects.

Dynamic treatment regimes assign personalized treatments to patients sequentially over time based on their baseline information and time-varying covariates. In mobile health applications, these covariates are typically collected at different frequencies over a long time horizon. In this paper, we propose a deep spectral Q-learning algorithm, which integrates principal component analysis (PCA) with deep Q-learning to handle the mixed frequency data. In theory, we prove that the mean return under the estimated optimal policy converges to that under the optimal one and establish its rate of convergence. The usefulness of our proposal is further illustrated via simulations and an application to a diabetes dataset.

As natural language processing (NLP) for gender bias becomes a significant interdisciplinary topic, the prevalent data-driven techniques such as large-scale language models suffer from data inadequacy and biased corpus, especially for languages with insufficient resources such as Chinese. To this end, we propose a Chinese cOrpus foR Gender bIas Probing and Mitigation CORGI-PM, which contains 32.9k sentences with high-quality labels derived by following an annotation scheme specifically developed for gender bias in the Chinese context. Moreover, we address three challenges for automatic textual gender bias mitigation, which requires the models to detect, classify, and mitigate textual gender bias. We also conduct experiments with state-of-the-art language models to provide baselines. To our best knowledge, CORGI-PM is the first sentence-level Chinese corpus for gender bias probing and mitigation.

Off-policy evaluation (OPE) is a method for estimating the return of a target policy using some pre-collected observational data generated by a potentially different behavior policy. In some cases, there may be unmeasured variables that can confound the action-reward or action-next-state relationships, rendering many existing OPE approaches ineffective. This paper develops an instrumental variable (IV)-based method for consistent OPE in confounded Markov decision processes (MDPs). Similar to single-stage decision making, we show that IV enables us to correctly identify the target policy's value in infinite horizon settings as well. Furthermore, we propose an efficient and robust value estimator and illustrate its effectiveness through extensive simulations and analysis of real data from a world-leading short-video platform.