Designing accurate and efficient ConvNets for mobile devices is challenging because the design space is combinatorially large. Due to this, previous neural architecture search (NAS) methods are computationally expensive. ConvNet architecture optimality depends on factors such as input resolution and target devices. However, existing approaches are too resource demanding for case-by-case redesigns. Also, previous work focuses primarily on reducing FLOPs, but FLOP count does not always reflect actual latency. To address these, we propose a differentiable neural architecture search (DNAS) framework that uses gradient-based methods to optimize Con-vNet architectures, avoiding enumerating and training individual architectures separately as in previous methods. FBNets (Facebook-Berkeley-Nets), a family of models discovered by DNAS surpass state-of-the-art models both designed manually and generated automatically. FBNet-B achieves 74.1% top-1 accuracy on ImageNet with 295M FLOPs and 23.1 ms latency on a Samsung S8 phone, 2.4x smaller and 1.5x faster than MobileNetV2-1.3[17] with similar accuracy. Despite higher accuracy and lower latency than MnasNet[20], we estimate FBNet-B's search cost is 420x smaller than MnasNet's, at only 216 GPUhours. Searched for different resolutions and channel sizes, FBNets achieve 1.5% to 6.4% higher accuracy than Mo-bileNetV2. The smallest FBNet achieves 50.2% accuracy and 2.9 ms latency (345 frames per second) on a Samsung S8. Over a Samsung-optimized FBNet, the iPhone-Xoptimized model achieves a 1.4x speedup on an iPhone X. FBNet models are open-sourced at https://github. com/facebookresearch/mobile-vision. * Work done while interning at Facebook. … … Stochastic super net Distribution Operators Probability Training super net Proxy dataset Sampling Operator Latency LUT Deploy Target device Benchmark … Search space … … Neural Architectures Figure 1. Differentiable neural architecture search (DNAS) for ConvNet design. DNAS explores a layer-wise space that each layer of a ConvNet can choose a different block. The search space is represented by a stochastic super net. The search process trains the stochastic super net using SGD to optimize the architecture distribution. Optimal architectures are sampled from the trained distribution. The latency of each operator is measured on target devices and used to compute the loss for the super net.

In this paper, we address semantic segmentation of road-objects from 3D LiDAR point clouds. In particular, we wish to detect and categorize instances of interest, such as cars, pedestrians and cyclists. We formulate this problem as a pointwise classification problem, and propose an end-to-end pipeline called SqueezeSeg based on convolutional neural networks (CNN): the CNN takes a transformed LiDAR point cloud as input and directly outputs a point-wise label map, which is then refined by a conditional random field (CRF) implemented as a recurrent layer. Instance-level labels are then obtained by conventional clustering algorithms. Our CNN model is trained on LiDAR point clouds from the KITTI [1] dataset, and our point-wise segmentation labels are derived from 3D bounding boxes from KITTI. To obtain extra training data, we built a LiDAR simulator into Grand Theft Auto V (GTA-V), a popular video game, to synthesize large amounts of realistic training data. Our experiments show that SqueezeSeg achieves high accuracy with astonishingly fast and stable runtime (8.7 ± 0.5 ms per frame), highly desirable for autonomous driving applications. Furthermore, additionally training on synthesized data boosts validation accuracy on real-world data. Our source code and synthesized data will be open-sourced.

Earlier work demonstrates the promise of deeplearning-based approaches for point cloud segmentation; however, these approaches need to be improved to be practically useful. To this end, we introduce a new model SqueezeSegV2 that is more robust to dropout noise in LiDAR point clouds. With improved model structure, training loss, batch normalization and additional input channel, SqueezeSegV2 achieves significant accuracy improvement when trained on real data. Training models for point cloud segmentation requires large amounts of labeled point-cloud data, which is expensive to obtain. To sidestep the cost of collection and annotation, simulators such as GTA-V can be used to create unlimited amounts of labeled, synthetic data. However, due to domain shift, models trained on synthetic data often do not generalize well to the real world. We address this problem with a domainadaptation training pipeline consisting of three major components: 1) learned intensity rendering, 2) geodesic correlation alignment, and 3) progressive domain calibration. When trained on real data, our new model exhibits segmentation accuracy improvements of 6.0-8.6% over the original SqueezeSeg. When training our new model on synthetic data using the proposed domain adaptation pipeline, we nearly double test accuracy on real-world data, from 29.0% to 57.4%. Our source code and synthetic dataset will be open-sourced.