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Communication overhead is the key challenge for distributed training. Gradient compression is a widely used approach to reduce communication traffic. When combined with a parallel communication mechanism method like pipeline, gradient compression technique can greatly alleviate the impact of communication overhead. However, there exist two problems of gradient compression technique to be solved. Firstly, gradient compression brings in extra computation cost, which will delay the next training iteration. Secondly, gradient compression usually leads to a decrease in convergence accuracy. In this paper, we combine parallel mechanism with gradient quantization and periodic full-gradient compensation, and propose a new distributed optimization method named CP-SGD, which can hide the overhead of gradient compression, overlap part of the communication and obtain high convergence accuracy. The local update operation in CP-SGD allows the next iteration to be launched quickly without waiting for the completion of gradient compression and the current communication process. Besides, the accuracy loss caused by gradient compression is solved by k-step correction method introduced in CP-SGD, which provides a gradient correction every k iterations. We prove that CP-SGD has a convergence guarantee and it achieves at least O (1 K + 1 K) convergence rate, where K is the number of iterations. We conduct extensive experiments on MXNet to verify the convergence properties and scaling performance of CP-SGD. Experimental results on a 32-GPU cluster show that convergence accuracy of CP-SGD is close to or even slightly better than that of S-SGD, and its end-to-end time is 30% less than 2-bit gradient compression under a 56Gbps bandwidth environment. In addition, we analyze the performance of CP-SGD when training on 8, 16 and 32 GPUs. It is found that CP-SGD is suitable for most compression-supported update algorithms, and its scalability is approximately linear. • CP-SGD: Distributed Stochastic Gradient Descent with Compression and Periodic Compensation. • CP-SGD help distributed deep learning train with high-accuracy and friendly-communication simultaneously. • Combining the advantages of parallel mechanism and gradient compression. • K-step correction technique makes CP-SGD achieve codesign optimizations and improve compression-based methods greatly. • CP-SGD suits most compression-supported update algorithms and gradient compression strategies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Synchronous SGD with data parallelism, the most popular parallelization strategy for CNN training, suffers from the expensive communication cost of averaging gradients among all workers. The iterative parameter updates of SGD cause frequent communications and it becomes the performance bottleneck. In this paper, we propose a lazy parameter update algorithm that adaptively adjusts the parameter update frequency to address the expensive communication cost issue. Our algorithm accumulates the gradients if the difference of the accumulated gradients and the latest gradients is sufficiently small. The less frequent parameter updates reduce the per-iteration communication cost while maintaining the model accuracy. Our experimental results demonstrate that the lazy update method remarkably improves the scalability while maintaining the model accuracy. For ResNet50 training on ImageNet, the proposed algorithm achieves a significantly higher speedup (739.6 on 2048 Cori KNL nodes) as compared to the vanilla synchronous SGD (276.6) while the model accuracy is almost not affected (<0.2% difference). • Adaptive parameter update frequency control for scalable parallel deep learning. • Allowing gradient accumulation considering the direction of the gradients. • Reducing per-iteration communication cost at the input side model layers. • Overlapping gradient communications with backpropagation computations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Learning-based super resolution (SR) has made remarkable progress in improving image quality compared to traditional methods. However, most of these algorithms assume ideal and known image degradation processes, such as bicubic downsampling. As a result, the performance of these algorithms significantly decreases when the degradation kernel changes in low-resolution images. Therefore, blind SR networks that can estimate the degradation kernel for each image are more adaptable in realistic scenarios. Hence, how to estimate accurate degradation kernels efficiently plays an extremely important role. Nevertheless, previous blind SR designs only use image information to constrain the kernel estimation network and train the network during the inference process, resulting in limited performance and very slow runtime. In this paper, we are the first to impose constraints for the kernel estimation network in both the image domain and kernel domain to effectively optimize estimated degradation kernels. Furthermore, an efficient multi-stage network structure is leveraged to accelerate inference speed while producing high-quality kernels. The results of evaluation experiments on publicly available datasets and realistic scenarios show that, the SR network based on the proposed design can not only produce state-of-the-art high-resolution SR images but also achieve a runtime of 0.03 s for kernel estimation when a low-resolution image is enlarged by 4 times on one NVIDIA 2080Ti GPU platform. • A high-quality and high-speed kernel estimation network is proposed for blind SR. • A efficient multi-stage network is employed to effectively estimate the kernels. • A multi-domain constraint in both image and kernel facilitates the quality of kernels. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Speaker diarization is a task to label audio or video recordings with classes that correspond to speaker identity, or in short, a task to identify "who spoke when". In the early years, speaker diarization algorithms were developed for speech recognition on multispeaker audio recordings to enable speaker adaptive processing. These algorithms also gained their own value as a standalone application over time to provide speaker-specific metainformation for downstream tasks such as audio retrieval. More recently, with the emergence of deep learning technology, which has driven revolutionary changes in research and practices across speech application domains, rapid advancements have been made for speaker diarization. In this paper, we review not only the historical development of speaker diarization technology but also the recent advancements in neural speaker diarization approaches. Furthermore, we discuss how speaker diarization systems have been integrated with speech recognition applications and how the recent surge of deep learning is leading the way of jointly modeling these two components to be complementary to each other. By considering such exciting technical trends, we believe that this paper is a valuable contribution to the community to provide a survey work by consolidating the recent developments with neural methods and thus facilitating further progress toward a more efficient speaker diarization. • The latest trends and approaches to speaker diarization as part of speech interaction applications. • Overview of the development of speaker diarization in the era of deep learning. • Review of diarization techniques belonging to the proposed taxonomy. • Introduction of techniques used in the traditional, modular speaker diarization systems. • Recent advancements in joint training approaches and fully end-to-end models. • A perspective of how speaker diarization has been investigated in the context of ASR. • Review of the challenges, the future of speaker diarization and the applications of speaker diarization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]