Lecturer: Marco Pedersoli is Assistant Professor at ETS Montreal. He obtained his PhD in computer science in 2012 at the Autonomous University of Barcelona and the Computer Vision Center of Barcelona. Then, he was a postdoctoral fellow in computer vision and machine learning at KU Leuven with Prof. Tuytelaars and later at INRIA Grenoble with Drs. Verbeek and Schmid. At ETS Montreal he is a member of LIVIA and he is co-chairing an industrial Chair on Embedded Neural Networks for Connected Building Control. His research is mostly applied on visual recognition, the automatic interpretation and understanding of images and videos. His specific focus is on reducing the complexity and the amount of annotation required for deep learning algorithms such as convolutional and recurrent neural networks. Prof. Pedersoli has authored more than 40 publications in top-tier international conferences and journals in computer vision and machine learning.
Abstract: In the last 10 years deep learning (DL) models have shown great progress in many different fields, from Computer Vision to Natural Language Processing. However, DL methods require great computational resources (i.e. GPUs or TPUs) and very large datasets, which also makes the training phase very long and painful. Thus, there is a strong need for reducing the computational cost of DL methods both in training as well as in deployment. In this talk, I present the most common families of approaches used to reduce the requirements of DL methods in terms of Memory and Computation for both training and deployment, and show how a reduction of the model footprint does not always produce a corresponding speed-up. Finally, I will present some recent results that suggest that large DL models are important mostly for facilitating the model training, and when that is finished, we can deploy a much smaller and faster model with almost no loss in accuracy.