Advanced CNNs for Computer Vision Applications
Chapter 1: Revisiting CNN Foundations and Modern Architectures
Brief Review of CNN Building Blocks
Evolution of CNN Architectures: AlexNet to ResNet
Understanding Residual Connections and Skip Architectures
Inception Modules and Network-in-Network Concepts
DenseNet: Architecture and Connectivity Patterns
EfficientNet: Compound Scaling for Models
Architectural Design Choices and Trade-offs
Implementing Modern Architectures Practice
Chapter 2: Advanced Training and Optimization Techniques
Advanced Optimization Algorithms
Learning Rate Schedules and Cyclical Learning Rates
Regularization Revisited: Advanced Techniques
Batch Normalization Internals and Alternatives
Weight Initialization Strategies for Deep Networks
Gradient Clipping and Gradient Flow Mitigation
Mixed Precision Training Fundamentals
Debugging and Monitoring Deep CNN Training
Hands-on Practical: Implementing Advanced Training Loops
Chapter 3: Object Detection Algorithms
Two-Stage Detectors: R-CNN Family
Region Proposal Networks Explained
Single-Stage Detectors: YOLO Family
Single-Stage Detectors: SSD and RetinaNet
Anchor Boxes: Design and Refinement
Non-Maximum Suppression Variants
Evaluation Metrics for Object Detection
Implementing an Object Detector Practice
Chapter 4: Image Segmentation Techniques
Semantic Segmentation vs. Instance Segmentation
Fully Convolutional Networks for Segmentation
Encoder-Decoder Architectures: U-Net and SegNet
Dilated (Atrous) Convolutions for Segmentation
DeepLab Family: Atrous Spatial Pyramid Pooling
Instance Segmentation Approaches (Mask R-CNN)
Evaluation Metrics for Segmentation
Hands-on Practical: Building a Semantic Segmentation Model
Chapter 5: Attention Mechanisms and Transformers in Vision
Self-Attention Mechanisms in CNNs
Non-local Neural Networks
Introduction to Vision Transformers
ViT Architecture: Patches, Embeddings, Transformer Encoder
Hybrid CNN-Transformer Models
Comparing CNNs and Transformers for Vision Tasks
Implementing Attention Blocks in CNNs Practice
Chapter 6: Advanced Transfer Learning and Domain Adaptation
Revisiting Transfer Learning Strategies
Fine-tuning vs. Feature Extraction: Advanced Considerations
Adapting Models to Different Data Distributions
Domain Generalization Concepts
Few-Shot Learning with CNNs
Self-Supervised Learning Pre-training for Vision
Hands-on Practical: Fine-tuning Models on Specialized Datasets
Chapter 7: Generative Adversarial Networks for Image Synthesis
GAN Fundamentals Revisited
Challenges in Training GANs
Deep Convolutional GANs (DCGANs)
Conditional GANs for Controlled Generation
StyleGAN Architecture and Style-Based Generation
Evaluation Metrics for GANs
Implementing a DCGAN for Image Generation Practice
Chapter 8: Model Compression and Efficient Deep Learning
Motivation for Efficient Models
Network Pruning Techniques
Knowledge Distillation Methods
Quantization: Reducing Model Precision
Designing Efficient Architectures
Neural Architecture Search Overview
Hands-on Practical: Applying Pruning and Quantization
Mixed Precision Training Fundamentals
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- Mixed-Precision Training for Deep Neural Networks, Paulius Micikevicius, Sharan Narang, Jonah Alben, Gregory Diamos, Erich Elsen, David Garcia, Boris Ginsburg, Michael Houston, Oleksii Kuchaiev, Ganesh Venkatesh, Hao Wu, 2018 International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR) DOI: 10.48550/arXiv.1710.03740 - Foundational paper introducing mixed-precision training for deep neural networks, including the use of FP16, loss scaling to prevent underflow, and benefits on NVIDIA GPUs with Tensor Cores.
- Automatic Mixed Precision for torch.cuda operations, PyTorch Authors, 2025 - Official PyTorch documentation explaining how to enable and use Automatic Mixed Precision (AMP) through
torch.cuda.amp.autocastandtorch.cuda.amp.GradScaler, providing practical implementation details. - Mixed precision training, TensorFlow Authors, 2023 - Official TensorFlow guide on how to implement mixed precision training in Keras using
tf.keras.mixed_precision.Policy, detailing the setup and usage for performance improvements.