We propose a practical approach to JPEG image de-coding, utilizing a local implicit neural representation with continuous cosine formulation. The JPEG algorithm sig-nificantly quantizes discrete cosine transform (DCT) spec-tra to achieve a high compression rate, inevitably resulting in quality degradation while encoding an image. We have designed a continuous cosine spectrum estimator to address the quality degradation issue that restores the distorted spectrum. By leveraging local DCT formulations, our network has the privilege to exploit dequantization and upsampling simultaneously. Our proposed model enables decoding compressed images directly across different quality factors using a single pre-trained model without relying on a conventional JPEG decoder. As a result, our proposed network achieves state-of-the-art performance in flexible color image JPEG artifact removal tasks. Our source code is available at https://github.com/WooKyoungHan/Jdec.

Architecture optimization, which is a technique for finding an efficient neural network that meets certain requirements, generally reduces to a set of multiple-choice selection problems among alternative sub-structures or parameters. The discrete nature of the selection problem, however, makes this optimization difficult. To tackle this problem we introduce a novel concept of a trainable gate function. The trainable gate function, which confers a differentiable property to discrete-valued variables, allows us to directly optimize loss functions that include non-differentiable discrete values such as 0-1 selection. The proposed trainable gate can be applied to pruning. Pruning can be carried out simply by appending the proposed trainable gate functions to each intermediate output tensor followed by fine-tuning the overall model, using any gradient-based training methods. So the proposed method can jointly optimize the selection of the pruned channels while fine-tuning the weights of the pruned model at the same time. Our experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method efficiently optimizes arbitrary neural networks in various tasks such as image classification, style transfer, optical flow estimation, and neural machine translation.

Despite strong performance on a variety of tasks, neural sequence models trained with maximum likelihood have been shown to exhibit issues such as length bias and degenerate repetition.We study the related issue of receiving infinite-length sequences from a recurrent language model when using common decoding algorithms.To analyze this issue, we first define inconsistency of a decoding algorithm, meaning that the algorithm can yield an infinite-length sequence that has zero probability under the model.We prove that commonly used incomplete decoding algorithms -greedy search, beam search, top-k sampling, and nucleus sampling -are inconsistent, despite the fact that recurrent language models are trained to produce sequences of finite length.Based on these insights, we propose two remedies which address inconsistency: consistent variants of top-k and nucleus sampling, and a selfterminating recurrent language model.Empirical results show that inconsistency occurs in practice, and that the proposed methods prevent inconsistency.

Estimating the relative importance of each sample in a training set has important practical and theoretical value, such as in importance sampling or curriculum learning. This kind of focus on individual samples invokes the concept of samplewise learnability: How easy is it to correctly learn each sample (cf. PAC learnability)? In this paper, we approach the sample-wise learnability problem within a deep learning context. We propose a measure of the learnability of a sample with a given deep neural network (DNN) model. The basic idea is to train the given model on the training set, and for each sample, aggregate the hits and misses over the entire training epochs. Our experiments show that the samplewise learnability measure collected this way is highly linearly correlated across different DNN models (ResNet-20, VGG-16, and MobileNet), suggesting that such a measure can provide deep general insights on the data’s properties. We expect our method to help develop better curricula for training, and help us better understand the data itself.