UC San Diego

Deep learning has brought remarkable improvement for the performance of image recognition tasks. However, the resource limitation forms a big obstacle for the real application of deep learning. Two types of resource constraints- limited machine's computing power and lack of annotated data are considered in the thesis. Compared to leveraging a large static network formed by input independent blocks, we try to overcome the issues of resource limitation with a more effective architecture by proposing a series of dynamic neural networks with input dependent blocks.

For the tasks with constrained computational resources, we first consider the multi-domain learning problem, which requires a single framework to perform well on multiple datasets for image classification. CovNorm is proposed to dynamically project a common feature to different feature spaces according to the dataset ID by consuming tiny numbers of extra parameters and computation. Then a large scale image recognition problem under different computational resources is explored. Dynamic Convolution Decomposition (DCD) is proposed for the machines with computing power from the order of 100 MFLOPs to 10 GFLOPs while MicroNet is designed to be applied on the machines with a computational cost far below 100 MFLOPs. Empowered by the dynamic architecture, both DCD and MicroNet achieve a significant improvement within their working scope.

For the issue of lacking annotated data, we work on the domain adaptation tasks, where the dataset is partially labeled and a domain gap exists between the labeled data (source domain) and the unlabeled data (target domain). We start by considering a relatively simple case with a single source and single target domain on semantic segmentation. A bidirectional learning (BDL) framework is designed and it reveals the synergy of several key factors, i.e., adversarial learning and self-training for domain adaptation. Based on the techniques given by BDL and the power of dynamic networks, a more complex problem- multi-source domain adaptation is investigated. Dynamic residual transfer (DRT) is presented and shows tremendous improvement for the adaptation performance compared to its static version. It confirms the effectiveness of dynamic networks for the image recognition problem when the amount of annotated data is limited.