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@PHDTHESIS{Quercia:1023964,
author = {Quercia, Alessio},
othercontributors = {Morrison, Abigail Joanna Rhodes and Assent, Ira and Scharr,
Hanno},
title = {{O}n data and knowledge transfer efficiency in deep
learning},
school = {RWTH Aachen University},
type = {Dissertation},
address = {Aachen},
publisher = {RWTH Aachen University},
reportid = {RWTH-2025-10885},
pages = {1 Online-Ressource : Illustrationen},
year = {2025},
note = {Veröffentlicht auf dem Publikationsserver der RWTH Aachen
University 2026; Dissertation, RWTH Aachen University, 2025},
abstract = {Deep Learning (DL) has seen rapid advancements,
characterized by the development of increasingly larger
models and datasets. This trend is driven by the belief that
bigger models yield better performance. However, the pursuit
of larger models and datasets has overshadowed
considerations of energy efficiency, leading to a race where
secondary factors, such as environmental impact, are
neglected. Efforts are underway to address these energy
inefficiencies. This work presents novel data and knowledge
transfer efficient training procedures alleviating the
energy inefficiencies introduced by the scaling up of models
and datasets in Computer Vision applications. In particular,
we introduce a data-efficient method that biases SGD towards
samples that are found to be more important after a few
training epochs. Compared to state-of-the-art methods, our
method does not require any additional overhead to estimate
sample importance. Moreover, we extend it to
super-resolution of Computer Tomography (CT) scans, recorded
at low resolution to avoid exposing patients to high
radiation and to reduce the costs. The super-resolved CT
images can then be used to predict the flow in the nasal
cavity through simulations. We explore ways to efficiently
transfer and re-use knowledge between similar vision tasks.
We propose an alternating training scheme leveraging
auxiliary non-MDE datasets from related vision tasks to
boost the MDE downstream task. This improves the MDE
performance by weighting MDE steps more than auxiliary ones.
Lastly, we propose ILoRA (Feature-Integral Low-Rank
Adaptation), a compute, parameter and memory efficient
fine-tuning method which uses the feature integral as fixed
compression and a single trainable vector as decompression.
Differently from state-of-the-art methods, ILoRA uses fewer
parameters per layer, reducing the memory footprint and the
computational cost. On one hand, this work shows that it is
possible to reduce the reliance on big datasets by using
carefully designed data efficient procedures, resulting in
faster model training with no performance drop. On the other
hand, it shows that training procedures can be boosted by
efficiently transferring knowledge from pre-trained
foundation models and by using additional auxiliary tasks.
Overall, efficient data and knowledge transfer strategies,
alongside advancements in hardware, can significantly reduce
the energy inefficiencies of scaling deep learning models
and datasets. By prioritizing these efficiencies, we can
develop sustainable AI systems that balance high performance
with minimal environmental impact.},
cin = {124920},
ddc = {004},
cid = {$I:(DE-82)124920_20200227$},
typ = {PUB:(DE-HGF)11},
doi = {10.18154/RWTH-2025-10885},
url = {https://publications.rwth-aachen.de/record/1023964},
}