In neural network binarization, BinaryConnect (BC) and its variants are considered the standard. These methods apply the sign function in their forward pass and their respective gradients are backpropagated to update the weights. However, the derivative of the sign function is zero whenever defined, which consequently freezes training. Therefore, implementations of BC (e.g., BNN) usually replace the derivative of sign in the backward computation with identity or other approximate gradient alternatives. Although such practice works well empirically, it is largely a heuristic or "training trick." We aim at shedding some light on these training tricks from the optimization perspective. Building from existing theory on ProxConnect (PC, a generalization of BC), we (1) equip PC with different forward-backward quantizers and obtain ProxConnect++ (PC++) that includes existing binarization techniques as special cases; (2) derive a principled way to synthesize forward-backward quantizers with automatic theoretical guarantees; (3) illustrate our theory by proposing an enhanced binarization algorithm BNN++; (4) conduct image classification experiments on CNNs and vision transformers, and empirically verify that BNN++ generally achieves competitive results on binarizing these models.

Text watermarks for large language models (LLMs) have been commonly used to identify the origins of machine-generated content, which is promising for assessing liability when combating deepfake or harmful content.

After this process, we utilize the official PyTorch implementation of Meng et al.

In many unpaired image domain translation problems, e.g., style transfer or super-resolution, it is important to keep the translated image similar to its respective input image.

The teacher-student framework, prevalent in semi-supervised semantic segmentation, mainly employs the exponential moving average (EMA) to update a single teacher's weights based on the student's. However, EMA updates raise a problem in that the weights of the teacher and student are getting coupled, causing a potential performance bottleneck. Furthermore, this problem may become more severe when training with more complicated labels such as segmentation masks but with few annotated data. This paper introduces Dual Teacher, a simple yet effective approach that employs dual temporary teachers aiming to alleviate the coupling problem for the student.