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Mohammad Rastegari

Mohammad Rastegari contributes to research discovery and scholarly infrastructure.

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Published work

12 published item(s)

preprint2026arXiv

LEAP: Learnable End-to-End Adaptive Pruning of Large Language Models

Unstructured sparsity is now natively accelerated by recent GPU kernels and dataflow hardware, shifting the bottleneck from inference execution to the pruning algorithm. State-of-the-art methods for unstructured LLM pruning are layer-wise surrogates derived from the Optimal Brain Surgeon principle, and they sacrifice end-to-end accuracy, especially under aggressive sparsity. End-to-end alternatives such as MaskLLM and PATCH show that learnable masks can close this gap, but their categorical-over-patterns parameterization scales with the number of valid masks per row and does not port to the unstructured setting. We introduce LEAP, which replaces this intractable parameterization with a per-weight Bernoulli-via-Gumbel- sigmoid relaxation that makes end-to-end unstructured mask learning tractable. Across five LLM families from 0.5B to 8B parameters at 50% and 60% sparsity, LEAP improves six-task average zero-shot accuracy by +2.59 points on average over ADMM, the best layer-wise baseline in our sweep.

preprint2024arXiv

Diffusion Models as Masked Audio-Video Learners

Over the past several years, the synchronization between audio and visual signals has been leveraged to learn richer audio-visual representations. Aided by the large availability of unlabeled videos, many unsupervised training frameworks have demonstrated impressive results in various downstream audio and video tasks. Recently, Masked Audio-Video Learners (MAViL) has emerged as a state-of-the-art audio-video pre-training framework. MAViL couples contrastive learning with masked autoencoding to jointly reconstruct audio spectrograms and video frames by fusing information from both modalities. In this paper, we study the potential synergy between diffusion models and MAViL, seeking to derive mutual benefits from these two frameworks. The incorporation of diffusion into MAViL, combined with various training efficiency methodologies that include the utilization of a masking ratio curriculum and adaptive batch sizing, results in a notable 32% reduction in pre-training Floating-Point Operations (FLOPS) and an 18% decrease in pre-training wall clock time. Crucially, this enhanced efficiency does not compromise the model's performance in downstream audio-classification tasks when compared to MAViL's performance.

preprint2022arXiv

CVNets: High Performance Library for Computer Vision

We introduce CVNets, a high-performance open-source library for training deep neural networks for visual recognition tasks, including classification, detection, and segmentation. CVNets supports image and video understanding tools, including data loading, data transformations, novel data sampling methods, and implementations of several standard networks with similar or better performance than previous studies. Our source code is available at: \url{https://github.com/apple/ml-cvnets}.

preprint2022arXiv

Layer-Wise Data-Free CNN Compression

We present a computationally efficient method for compressing a trained neural network without using real data. We break the problem of data-free network compression into independent layer-wise compressions. We show how to efficiently generate layer-wise training data using only a pretrained network. We use this data to perform independent layer-wise compressions on the pretrained network. We also show how to precondition the network to improve the accuracy of our layer-wise compression method. We present results for layer-wise compression using quantization and pruning. When quantizing, we compress with higher accuracy than related works while using orders of magnitude less compute. When compressing MobileNetV2 and evaluating on ImageNet, our method outperforms existing methods for quantization at all bit-widths, achieving a $+0.34\%$ improvement in $8$-bit quantization, and a stronger improvement at lower bit-widths (up to a $+28.50\%$ improvement at $5$ bits). When pruning, we outperform baselines of a similar compute envelope, achieving $1.5$ times the sparsity rate at the same accuracy. We also show how to combine our efficient method with high-compute generative methods to improve upon their results.

preprint2022arXiv

MobileViT: Light-weight, General-purpose, and Mobile-friendly Vision Transformer

Light-weight convolutional neural networks (CNNs) are the de-facto for mobile vision tasks. Their spatial inductive biases allow them to learn representations with fewer parameters across different vision tasks. However, these networks are spatially local. To learn global representations, self-attention-based vision trans-formers (ViTs) have been adopted. Unlike CNNs, ViTs are heavy-weight. In this paper, we ask the following question: is it possible to combine the strengths of CNNs and ViTs to build a light-weight and low latency network for mobile vision tasks? Towards this end, we introduce MobileViT, a light-weight and general-purpose vision transformer for mobile devices. MobileViT presents a different perspective for the global processing of information with transformers, i.e., transformers as convolutions. Our results show that MobileViT significantly outperforms CNN- and ViT-based networks across different tasks and datasets. On the ImageNet-1k dataset, MobileViT achieves top-1 accuracy of 78.4% with about 6 million parameters, which is 3.2% and 6.2% more accurate than MobileNetv3 (CNN-based) and DeIT (ViT-based) for a similar number of parameters. On the MS-COCO object detection task, MobileViT is 5.7% more accurate than MobileNetv3 for a similar number of parameters. Our source code is open-source and available at: https://github.com/apple/ml-cvnets

preprint2022arXiv

Separable Self-attention for Mobile Vision Transformers

Mobile vision transformers (MobileViT) can achieve state-of-the-art performance across several mobile vision tasks, including classification and detection. Though these models have fewer parameters, they have high latency as compared to convolutional neural network-based models. The main efficiency bottleneck in MobileViT is the multi-headed self-attention (MHA) in transformers, which requires $O(k^2)$ time complexity with respect to the number of tokens (or patches) $k$. Moreover, MHA requires costly operations (e.g., batch-wise matrix multiplication) for computing self-attention, impacting latency on resource-constrained devices. This paper introduces a separable self-attention method with linear complexity, i.e. $O(k)$. A simple yet effective characteristic of the proposed method is that it uses element-wise operations for computing self-attention, making it a good choice for resource-constrained devices. The improved model, MobileViTv2, is state-of-the-art on several mobile vision tasks, including ImageNet object classification and MS-COCO object detection. With about three million parameters, MobileViTv2 achieves a top-1 accuracy of 75.6% on the ImageNet dataset, outperforming MobileViT by about 1% while running $3.2\times$ faster on a mobile device. Our source code is available at: \url{https://github.com/apple/ml-cvnets}

preprint2022arXiv

SPIN: An Empirical Evaluation on Sharing Parameters of Isotropic Networks

Recent isotropic networks, such as ConvMixer and vision transformers, have found significant success across visual recognition tasks, matching or outperforming non-isotropic convolutional neural networks (CNNs). Isotropic architectures are particularly well-suited to cross-layer weight sharing, an effective neural network compression technique. In this paper, we perform an empirical evaluation on methods for sharing parameters in isotropic networks (SPIN). We present a framework to formalize major weight sharing design decisions and perform a comprehensive empirical evaluation of this design space. Guided by our experimental results, we propose a weight sharing strategy to generate a family of models with better overall efficiency, in terms of FLOPs and parameters versus accuracy, compared to traditional scaling methods alone, for example compressing ConvMixer by 1.9x while improving accuracy on ImageNet. Finally, we perform a qualitative study to further understand the behavior of weight sharing in isotropic architectures. The code is available at https://github.com/apple/ml-spin.

preprint2020arXiv

Butterfly Transform: An Efficient FFT Based Neural Architecture Design

In this paper, we show that extending the butterfly operations from the FFT algorithm to a general Butterfly Transform (BFT) can be beneficial in building an efficient block structure for CNN designs. Pointwise convolutions, which we refer to as channel fusions, are the main computational bottleneck in the state-of-the-art efficient CNNs (e.g. MobileNets ). We introduce a set of criteria for channel fusion and prove that BFT yields an asymptotically optimal FLOP count with respect to these criteria. By replacing pointwise convolutions with BFT, we reduce the computational complexity of these layers from O(n^2) to O(n\log n) with respect to the number of channels. Our experimental evaluations show that our method results in significant accuracy gains across a wide range of network architectures, especially at low FLOP ranges. For example, BFT results in up to a 6.75% absolute Top-1 improvement for MobileNetV1, 4.4 \% for ShuffleNet V2 and 5.4% for MobileNetV3 on ImageNet under a similar number of FLOPS. Notably, ShuffleNet-V2+BFT outperforms state-of-the-art architecture search methods MNasNet, FBNet and MobilenetV3 in the low FLOP regime.

preprint2020arXiv

DeFINE: DEep Factorized INput Token Embeddings for Neural Sequence Modeling

For sequence models with large vocabularies, a majority of network parameters lie in the input and output layers. In this work, we describe a new method, DeFINE, for learning deep token representations efficiently. Our architecture uses a hierarchical structure with novel skip-connections which allows for the use of low dimensional input and output layers, reducing total parameters and training time while delivering similar or better performance versus existing methods. DeFINE can be incorporated easily in new or existing sequence models. Compared to state-of-the-art methods including adaptive input representations, this technique results in a 6% to 20% drop in perplexity. On WikiText-103, DeFINE reduces the total parameters of Transformer-XL by half with minimal impact on performance. On the Penn Treebank, DeFINE improves AWD-LSTM by 4 points with a 17% reduction in parameters, achieving comparable performance to state-of-the-art methods with fewer parameters. For machine translation, DeFINE improves the efficiency of the Transformer model by about 1.4 times while delivering similar performance.

preprint2020arXiv

What's Hidden in a Randomly Weighted Neural Network?

Training a neural network is synonymous with learning the values of the weights. By contrast, we demonstrate that randomly weighted neural networks contain subnetworks which achieve impressive performance without ever training the weight values. Hidden in a randomly weighted Wide ResNet-50 we show that there is a subnetwork (with random weights) that is smaller than, but matches the performance of a ResNet-34 trained on ImageNet. Not only do these "untrained subnetworks" exist, but we provide an algorithm to effectively find them. We empirically show that as randomly weighted neural networks with fixed weights grow wider and deeper, an "untrained subnetwork" approaches a network with learned weights in accuracy. Our code and pretrained models are available at https://github.com/allenai/hidden-networks.

preprint2014arXiv

Comparing apples to apples in the evaluation of binary coding methods

We discuss methodological issues related to the evaluation of unsupervised binary code construction methods for nearest neighbor search. These issues have been widely ignored in literature. These coding methods attempt to preserve either Euclidean distance or angular (cosine) distance in the binary embedding space. We explain why when comparing a method whose goal is preserving cosine similarity to one designed for preserving Euclidean distance, the original features should be normalized by mapping them to the unit hypersphere before learning the binary mapping functions. To compare a method whose goal is to preserves Euclidean distance to one that preserves cosine similarity, the original feature data must be mapped to a higher dimension by including a bias term in binary mapping functions. These conditions ensure the fair comparison between different binary code methods for the task of nearest neighbor search. Our experiments show under these conditions the very simple methods (e.g. LSH and ITQ) often outperform recent state-of-the-art methods (e.g. MDSH and OK-means).

preprint2012arXiv

Semantic Understanding of Professional Soccer Commentaries

This paper presents a novel approach to the problem of semantic parsing via learning the correspondences between complex sentences and rich sets of events. Our main intuition is that correct correspondences tend to occur more frequently. Our model benefits from a discriminative notion of similarity to learn the correspondence between sentence and an event and a ranking machinery that scores the popularity of each correspondence. Our method can discover a group of events (called macro-events) that best describes a sentence. We evaluate our method on our novel dataset of professional soccer commentaries. The empirical results show that our method significantly outperforms the state-of-theart.