1. SBNet: Sparse Blocks Network for Fast Inference
Mengye Ren, Andrei Pokrovsky, Bin Yang, Raquel Urtasun
Uber Advanced Technologies Group
University of Toronto
Presented by Kaizheng hu

2. Background Deep CNNs dominate the computer vision field.
As number of layers goes up, computation becomes expensive.
Autonomous driving as a real-time task is sensitive to time cost.
The approach in this work show both theoretical and practical speed-up without loss of accuracy.

3. Idea
It's observed that many input sources have structured sparsity that meshes well with block sparsity.
 It stands to reason that computations for entire spatial clumps or ’blocks’ of activations can be skipped.
Sparsity  computation in deep learning has been extensively explored in the weights domain,  where the model size can be significantly reduced through pruning and low-rank decomposition. However it is not trivial to achieve huge speed-up from sparse filters without loss of accuracy because a single filter channel is rarely very close to zero at every point.
Previous researches were focused on accuracy, not speed up.

4. SBNet: Sparse Blocks Network
Reduce mask to indices: converts a binary mask to a list of indices, where each index references the location of the corresponding n - dimensional block in the input tensor and in our current implementation this is a 3-d block where indices are shared across the channel dimension.
 Sparse gather/scatter:  Gathering extracts a block from the input tensor, given the start location and the size of the n-d block. Scatter is the inverse operation that updates the output tensor using previously gathered and transformed data and the same index list that is used during the gather phase.

5.  Reduce mask to indices

6. Sparse gather/scatter

7. Sparse gather/scatter
Sparse gather/scatter operations convert the network
between dense and sparse modes.
This input overlap is essential to producing the output that seamlessly stitches the results of adjacent block convolutions in a way that is locally-equivalent to a dense convolution on a larger block (as we will show in the next section) and fused indexing capability is critical to practical speed-up. Here, we introduce the technical details of our proposed gather and scatter operations.

8. Gather kernel

9. Scatter kernel

10.  Sparse residual units
A single residual unit contains three convolutions, batch normalization and ReLU layers, all of which can be operated in sparse mode. The total increase in receptive field of a residual unit is the same as a single 3 * 3 convolution.

11. Performance 1/2

12. Performance 2/2
Video demo

13. Questions: To training or test does this happen?
This happens to test cases, real-time.
How is this different from dropout?
Dropout is used to reduce overfitting. It’s random. On the contrary, the use of sparsity is supposed to be targeting.

14. ResNet

15. Residual Unit
The three layers are 1×1, 3×3, and 1×1 convolutions, where the 1×1 layers are responsible for reducing and then increasing (restoring) dimensions, leaving the 3×3 layer a bottleneck with smaller input/output dimensions. Fig. 5 shows an example, where both designs have similar time complexity.

16. Performance – ResNet 50 (41)

17. Performance - Plain CNN (28)

18. Performance – ResNet 50 (23)

19. Performance- SVM, RandomForest
When C is 0.01: acc is
When C is 0.1: acc is
When C is 1: acc is
When C is 10: acc is
When C is 100: acc is
Random Forest:
With 10 trees: acc is
With 100 trees: acc is
With 1000 trees: acc is
With trees: acc is

20. References
Kaiming He, Xiangyu Zhang, Shaoqing Ren, Jian Sun. Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition
Mengye Ren, Andrei Pokrovsky, Bin Yang, Raquel Urtasun. SBNet: Sparse Blocks Network for Fast Inference

21. Thank you!

22. code