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Sideways: Depth-Parallel Training of Video Models (arxiv.org)
1 point by davidfoster on Jan 20, 2020 | hide | past | pdf | discuss on HN

In plain words: Instead of saving every frame's activations until the backward pass, this scheme overwrites them as new frames arrive, letting the network's layers work at the same time. It still trains video networks to converge and can even generalize better than standard backpropagation.

Abstract

We propose Sideways, an approximate backpropagation scheme for training video models. In standard backpropagation, the gradients and activations at every computation step through the model are temporally synchronized. The forward activations need to be stored until the backward pass is executed, preventing inter-layer (depth) parallelization. However, can we leverage smooth, redundant input streams such as videos to develop a more efficient training scheme? Here, we explore an alternative to backpropagation; we overwrite network activations whenever new ones, i.e., from new frames, become available. Such a more gradual accumulation of information from both passes breaks the precise correspondence between gradients and activations, leading to theoretically more noisy weight updates. Counter-intuitively, we show that Sideways training of deep convolutional video networks not only still converges, but can also potentially exhibit better generalization compared to standard synchronized backpropagation.

Mateusz Malinowski, Grzegorz Swirszcz, Joao Carreira, Viorica Patraucean
arXiv:2001.06232 · cs.LG, cs.CV, stat.ML · submitted Jan 17, 2020 · updated Mar 30, 2020
abstract · pdf · html · Accepted at CVPR'20

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