@mastersthesis {xCampos17, title = {Learning to Skip State Updates in Recurrent Neural Networks}, year = {2017}, abstract = {

Program:\ Master{\textquoteright}s Degree in Telecommunications Engineering

Grade: A with honours (10.0/10.0)

Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs) continue to show outstanding performance in sequence modeling tasks. However, training RNNs on long sequences often face challenges like slow inference, vanishing gradients and dificulty in capturing long term dependencies. In backpropagation through time settings, these issues are tightly coupled with the large, sequential computational graph resulting from unfolding the RNN in time. We introduce the Skip RNN model which extends existing RNN models by learning to skip state updates and shortens the effective size of the computational graph. This network can be encouraged to perform fewer state updates through a novel loss term. We evaluate the proposed model on various tasks and show how it can reduce the number of required RNN updates while preserving, and sometimes even improving, the performance of the baseline models.

Skip RNN: Learning to Skip State Updates in Recurrent Neural Networks from Xavier Giro-i-Nieto
}, keywords = {conditional computation, deep learning, machine learning, recurrent neural networks, sequence modeling}, url = {https://imatge-upc.github.io/skiprnn-2017-telecombcn/}, author = {V{\'\i}ctor Campos}, editor = {Jou, Brendan and Chang, Shih-Fu and Xavier Gir{\'o}-i-Nieto} } @mastersthesis {xCampos-Camunez, title = {Layer-wise CNN Surgery for Visual Sentiment Prediction}, year = {2015}, abstract = {

Advisors: Amaia Salvador (UPC), Brendan Jou (Columbia University) and Xavier Gir{\'o}-i-Nieto (UPC)

Visual media are powerful means of expressing emotions and sentiments. The constant generation of new content in social networks highlights the need of automated visual sentiment analysis tools. While Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) have established a new state-of-the-art in several vision problems, their application to the task of sentiment analysis is mostly unexplored and there are few studies regarding how to design CNNs for this purpose. In this work, we study the suitability of fine-tuning a CNN for visual sentiment prediction as well as explore performance boosting techniques within this deep learning setting. Finally, we provide a deep-dive analysis into a benchmark, state-of-the-art network architecture to gain insight about how to design patterns for CNNs on the task of visual sentiment prediction.

Layer-wise CNN Surgery for Visual Sentiment Prediction from Xavier Giro

}, author = {V{\'\i}ctor Campos}, editor = {Amaia Salvador and Jou, Brendan and Xavier Gir{\'o}-i-Nieto} }