Cross-lingual text classification(CLTC) is the task of classifying documents written in different languages into the same taxonomy of categories. This paper presents a novel approach to CLTC that builds on model distillation, which adapts and extends a framework originally proposed for model compression. Using soft probabilistic predictions for the documents in a label-rich language as the (induced) supervisory labels in a parallel corpus of documents, we train classifiers successfully for new languages in which labeled training data are not available. An adversarial feature adaptation technique is also applied during the model training to reduce distribution mismatch. We conducted experiments on two benchmark CLTC datasets, treating English as the source language and German, French, Japan and Chinese as the unlabeled target languages. The proposed approach had the advantageous or comparable performance of the other state-of-art methods.
Binarization is an extreme network compression approach that provides large computational speedups along with energy and memory savings, albeit at significant accuracy costs. We investigate the question of where to binarize inputs at layer-level granularity and show that selectively binarizing the inputs to specific layers in the network could lead to significant improvements in accuracy while preserving most of the advantages of binarization. We analyze the binarization tradeoff using a metric that jointly models the input binarization-error and computational cost and introduce an efficient algorithm to select layers whose inputs are to be binarized. Practical guidelines based on insights obtained from applying the algorithm to a variety of models are discussed. Experiments on Imagenet dataset using AlexNet and ResNet-18 models show 3-4% improvements in accuracy over fully binarized networks with minimal impact on compression and computational speed. The improvements are even more substantial on sketch datasets like TU-Berlin, where we match state-of-the-art accuracy as well, getting over 8% increase in accuracies. We further show that our approach can be applied in tandem with other forms of compression that deal with individual layers or overall model compression (e.g., SqueezeNets). Unlike previous quantization approaches, we are able to binarize the weights in the last layers of a network, which often have a large number of parameters, resulting in significant improvement in accuracy over fully binarized models.
A large fraction of the arithmetic operations required to evaluate deep neural networks (DNNs) consists of matrix multiplications, in both convolution and fully connected layers. We perform end-to-end learning of low-cost approximations of matrix multiplications in DNN layers by casting matrix multiplications as 2-layer sum-product networks (SPNs) (arithmetic circuits) and learning their (ternary) edge weights from data. The SPNs disentangle multiplication and addition operations and enable us to impose a budget on the number of multiplication operations. Combining our method with knowledge distillation and applying it to image classification DNNs (trained on ImageNet) and language modeling DNNs (using LSTMs), we obtain a first-of-a-kind reduction in number of multiplications (over 99.5%) while maintaining the predictive performance of the full-precision models. Finally, we demonstrate that the proposed framework is able to rediscover Strassen's matrix multiplication algorithm, learning to multiply $2 \times 2$ matrices using only 7 multiplications instead of 8.