Biography

I am pursuing my master degree in College of Control Science and Engineering, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, China. My major research interests include model compress and object detection.

Research and Interests

• Model Compress
• Object Detection

Publications

• Guanzhong Tian, Yiran Sun, Yuang Liu, Xianfang Zeng, Mengmeng Wang, Yong Liu, Jiangning Zhang, and Jun Chen. Adding before Pruning: Sparse Filter Fusion for Deep Convolutional Neural Networks via Auxiliary Attention. IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks and Learning Systems, 2021.
  [BibTeX] [Abstract] [DOI] [PDF]

  Filter pruning is a significant feature selection technique to shrink the existing feature fusion schemes (especially on convolution calculation and model size), which helps to develop more efficient feature fusion models while maintaining state-of-the-art performance. In addition, it reduces the storage and computation requirements of deep neural networks (DNNs) and accelerates the inference process dramatically. Existing methods mainly rely on manual constraints such as normalization to select the filters. A typical pipeline comprises two stages: first pruning the original neural network and then fine-tuning the pruned model. However, choosing a manual criterion can be somehow tricky and stochastic. Moreover, directly regularizing and modifying filters in the pipeline suffer from being sensitive to the choice of hyperparameters, thus making the pruning procedure less robust. To address these challenges, we propose to handle the filter pruning issue through one stage: using an attention-based architecture that adaptively fuses the filter selection with filter learning in a unified network. Specifically, we present a pruning method named adding before pruning (ABP) to make the model focus on the filters of higher significance by training instead of man-made criteria such as norm, rank, etc. First, we add an auxiliary attention layer into the original model and set the significance scores in this layer to be binary. Furthermore, to propagate the gradients in the auxiliary attention layer, we design a specific gradient estimator and prove its effectiveness for convergence in the graph flow through mathematical derivation. In the end, to relieve the dependence on the complicated prior knowledge for designing the thresholding criterion, we simultaneously prune and train the filters to automatically eliminate network redundancy with recoverability. Extensive experimental results on the two typical image classification benchmarks, CIFAR-10 and ILSVRC-2012, illustrate that the proposed approach performs favorably against previous state-of-the-art filter pruning algorithms.

  @article{tian2021abp,
  title = {Adding before Pruning: Sparse Filter Fusion for Deep Convolutional Neural Networks via Auxiliary Attention},
  author = {Guanzhong Tian and Yiran Sun and Yuang Liu and Xianfang Zeng and Mengmeng Wang and Yong Liu and Jiangning Zhang and Jun Chen},
  year = 2021,
  journal = {IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks and Learning Systems},
  doi = {10.1109/TNNLS.2021.3106917},
  abstract = {Filter pruning is a significant feature selection technique to shrink the existing feature fusion schemes (especially on convolution calculation and model size), which helps to develop more efficient feature fusion models while maintaining state-of-the-art performance. In addition, it reduces the storage and computation requirements of deep neural networks (DNNs) and accelerates the inference process dramatically. Existing methods mainly rely on manual constraints such as normalization to select the filters. A typical pipeline comprises two stages: first pruning the original neural network and then fine-tuning the pruned model. However, choosing a manual criterion can be somehow tricky and stochastic. Moreover, directly regularizing and modifying filters in the pipeline suffer from being sensitive to the choice of hyperparameters, thus making the pruning procedure less robust. To address these challenges, we propose to handle the filter pruning issue through one stage: using an attention-based architecture that adaptively fuses the filter selection with filter learning in a unified network. Specifically, we present a pruning method named adding before pruning (ABP) to make the model focus on the filters of higher significance by training instead of man-made criteria such as norm, rank, etc. First, we add an auxiliary attention layer into the original model and set the significance scores in this layer to be binary. Furthermore, to propagate the gradients in the auxiliary attention layer, we design a specific gradient estimator and prove its effectiveness for convergence in the graph flow through mathematical derivation. In the end, to relieve the dependence on the complicated prior knowledge for designing the thresholding criterion, we simultaneously prune and train the filters to automatically eliminate network redundancy with recoverability. Extensive experimental results on the two typical image classification benchmarks, CIFAR-10 and ILSVRC-2012, illustrate that the proposed approach performs favorably against previous state-of-the-art filter pruning algorithms.}
  }

• Zhishan Li, Yiran Sun, Guanzhong Tian, Lei Xie, Yong Liu, Hongye Su, and Yifan He. A compression pipeline for one-stage object detection model. Journal of Real-Time Image Processing, 2021.
  [BibTeX] [Abstract] [DOI] [PDF]

  Deep neural networks (DNNs) have strong fitting ability on a variety of computer vision tasks, but they also require intensive computing power and large storage space, which are not always available in portable smart devices. Although a lot of studies have contributed to the compression of image classification networks, there are few model compression algorithms for object detection models. In this paper, we propose a general compression pipeline for one-stage object detection networks to meet the real-time requirements. Firstly, we propose a softer pruning strategy on the backbone to reduce the number of filters. Compared with original direct pruning, our method can maintain the integrity of network structure and reduce the drop of accuracy. Secondly, we transfer the knowledge of the original model to the small model by knowledge distillation to reduce the accuracy drop caused by pruning. Finally, as edge devices are more suitable for integer operations, we further transform the 32-bit floating point model into the 8-bit integer model through quantization. With this pipeline, the model size and inference time are compressed to 10% or less of the original, while the mAP is only reduced by 2.5% or less. We verified that performance of the compression pipeline on the Pascal VOC dataset.

  @article{li2021acp,
  title = {A compression pipeline for one-stage object detection model},
  author = {Zhishan Li and Yiran Sun and Guanzhong Tian and Lei Xie and Yong Liu and Hongye Su and Yifan He},
  year = 2021,
  journal = {Journal of Real-Time Image Processing},
  doi = {10.1007/s11554-021-01082-2},
  abstract = {Deep neural networks (DNNs) have strong fitting ability on a variety of computer vision tasks, but they also require intensive computing power and large storage space, which are not always available in portable smart devices. Although a lot of studies have contributed to the compression of image classification networks, there are few model compression algorithms for object detection models. In this paper, we propose a general compression pipeline for one-stage object detection networks to meet the real-time requirements. Firstly, we propose a softer pruning strategy on the backbone to reduce the number of filters. Compared with original direct pruning, our method can maintain the integrity of network structure and reduce the drop of accuracy. Secondly, we transfer the knowledge of the original model to the small model by knowledge distillation to reduce the accuracy drop caused by pruning. Finally, as edge devices are more suitable for integer operations, we further transform the 32-bit floating point model into the 8-bit integer model through quantization. With this pipeline, the model size and inference time are compressed to 10% or less of the original, while the mAP is only reduced by 2.5% or less. We verified that performance of the compression pipeline on the Pascal VOC dataset.}
  }

• Guanzhong Tian, Liang Liu, JongHyok Ri, Yong Liu, and Yiran Sun. ObjectFusion: An object detection and segmentation framework with RGB-D SLAM and convolutional neural networks. Neurocomputing, 345:3–14, 2019.
  [BibTeX] [Abstract] [DOI] [PDF]

  Given the driving advances on CNNs (Convolutional Neural Networks) [1], deep neural networks being deployed for accurate detection and semantic reconstruction in SLAM (Simultaneous Localization and Mapping) has become a trend. However, as far as we know, almost all existing methods focus on design a specific CNN architecture for single task. In this paper, we propose a novel framework which employs a general object detection CNN to fuse with a SLAM system towards obtaining better performances on both detection and semantic segmentation in 3D space. Our approach first use CNN-based detection network to obtain the 2D object proposals which can be used to establish the local target map. We then use the results estimated from SLAM to update the dynamic global target map based on the local target map obtained by CNNs. Finally, we are able to obtain the detection result for the current frame by projecting the global target map into 2D space. On the other hand, we send the estimation results back to SLAM and update the semantic surfel model in SLAM system. Therefore, we can acquire the segmentation result by projecting the updated 3D surfel model into 2D. Our fusion scheme privileges in object detection and segmentation by integrating with SLAM system to preserve the spatial continuity and temporal consistency. Evaluation performances on four datasets demonstrate the effectiveness and robustness of our method.

  @article{tian2019objectfusionao,
  title = {ObjectFusion: An object detection and segmentation framework with RGB-D SLAM and convolutional neural networks},
  author = {Guanzhong Tian and Liang Liu and JongHyok Ri and Yong Liu and Yiran Sun},
  year = 2019,
  journal = {Neurocomputing},
  volume = 345,
  pages = {3--14},
  doi = {https://doi.org/10.1016/J.NEUCOM.2019.01.088},
  abstract = {Given the driving advances on CNNs (Convolutional Neural Networks) [1], deep neural networks being deployed for accurate detection and semantic reconstruction in SLAM (Simultaneous Localization and Mapping) has become a trend. However, as far as we know, almost all existing methods focus on design a specific CNN architecture for single task. In this paper, we propose a novel framework which employs a general object detection CNN to fuse with a SLAM system towards obtaining better performances on both detection and semantic segmentation in 3D space. Our approach first use CNN-based detection network to obtain the 2D object proposals which can be used to establish the local target map. We then use the results estimated from SLAM to update the dynamic global target map based on the local target map obtained by CNNs. Finally, we are able to obtain the detection result for the current frame by projecting the global target map into 2D space. On the other hand, we send the estimation results back to SLAM and update the semantic surfel model in SLAM system. Therefore, we can acquire the segmentation result by projecting the updated 3D surfel model into 2D. Our fusion scheme privileges in object detection and segmentation by integrating with SLAM system to preserve the spatial continuity and temporal consistency. Evaluation performances on four datasets demonstrate the effectiveness and robustness of our method.}
  }