The Helmholtz Method: Using Perceptual Compression to Reduce ML Complexity

Created by Gerald Friedland, Jingkang Wang, Ruoxi Jia, Bo Li and Dawn Song.

Introduction

This work is based on our arXiv tech report. We propose a fundamental answer to a frequently asked question in multimedia computing and machine learning: Do artifacts from perceptual compression contribute to error in the machine learning process and if so, how much? You can also check our project webpage for a deeper introduction.

Just like electricity doesn't originate from the power outlet, pixels don't randomly appear in an image file. Cameras are physical sensors that follow the laws of thermodynamics. Knowing this makes it easier to understand the properties of pixels as we train machine learners to recognize patterns in images.

Our approach to the problem is a reinterpretation of the Helmholtz Free Energy formula from physics to explain the relationship between content and noise when using sensors (such as cameras or microphones) to capture multimedia data. Extensive experiments show that, at the right quality level, perceptual compression is actually not harmful but contributes to a significant reduction of complexity of the machine learning process. Our work provides insights into the reasons for the success of deep learning.

In this repository, we release code and data for conducting perceptual compression while maintaining, or sometimes even improving, overall performance. Additionally, compressed models usually result in faster training convergent.

Requirements

• Tensorflow 1.4.0
• Keras 2.1.5
• Python 2.7
• CUDA 8.0+ (For GPU)
• Python Libraries: numpy pandas, h5py, pillow, imageio, librosa and librosa
• lame tool (for MP3 compression)

The code has been tested with Python 2.7, Tensorflow 1.4.0, CUDA 8.0 and cuDNN 5.1 on Ubuntu 14.04. But it may work on more machines (directly or through mini-modification), pull-requests or test report are well welcomed.

Usage

To train a model to classify images in CIFAR-10 (quality 5, architecure A)

cd cifar
python train.py --quality 5 --setting 0

Log files and network parameters will be saved to logs folder in default.

To see HELP for the training script:

cd cifar && python train.py -h (CIFAR-10)
cd audio && python train.py -h (Audio)

If enough GPUs are available, you could use scripts to train models with different settings (architecture, compression ratio). Remember to manually specify proper GPUs in the script (Each process occupies around 3500M graphic memory).

cd cifar
sh scripts/train-all-cnns.sh

More details are provided in our project webpage.

Architectures

To evaluate our idea, we have designed six different architectures on CIFAR-10 and Audio dataset, respectively. The details of models (architectures, number of parameters) could be obtained from cifar_paras and audio_paras.

Citation

If you find our work useful in your research, please consider citing:

@article{helmholtz18,
  title={The Helmholtz Method: Using Perceptual Compression to Reduce Machine Learning Complexity},
  author={Gerald Friedland and Jingkang Wang and Ruoxi Jia and Bo Li and Dawn Song},
  journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:1804.xxxxx},
  year={2018}
}

Acknowledgements

This code is based on the previous works (All-Conv-Keras，panotti). Many thanks to the authors.

License

Our code is released under Apache License 2.0.