We introduce Evenly Cascaded convolutional Network (ECN), a neural network taking inspiration from the cascade algorithm of wavelet analysis. ECN employs two feature streams - a low-level and high-level steam. At each layer these streams interact, such that low-level features are modulated using advanced perspectives from the high-level stream. ECN is evenly structured through resizing feature map dimensions by a consistent ratio, which removes the burden of ad-hoc specification of feature map dimensions. ECN produces easily interpretable features maps, a result whose intuition can be understood in the context of scale-space theory. We demonstrate that ECN’s design facilitates the training process through providing easily trainable shortcuts. We report new state-of-the-art results for small networks, without the need for additional treatment such as pruning or compression - a consequence of ECN’s simple structure and direct training. A 6-layered ECN design with under 500k parameters achieves 95.24 and 78.99 accuracy on CIFAR-10 and CIFAR-100 datasets, respectively, outperforming the current state-of-the-art on small parameter networks, and a 3 million parameter ECN produces results competitive to the state-of-the-art.
Skip connections or identity maps in the networks @cite_9 @cite_6 @cite_21 @cite_35 are a popular method for improving network performance. One intuitive understanding of the function of skip connections is that they pass lower level representations to deeper levels. In LSTM @cite_9 and ResNet @cite_6 networks the representations are adapted during this process. Whereas in DenseNet @cite_21 shallow features are passed to the deeper levels without modification. One recent work, termed Dual Path Networks(DPN) @cite_35 , connects the two approaches using a high order recurrent neural network, and horizontally concatenates ResNet @cite_6 and DensNet @cite_21 , and shows improved performance.
@cite_35 @cite_9 @cite_21 @cite_6
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Deep architectures using identity skip-connections have demonstrated groundbreaking performance in the field of image classification. Recently, empirical studies suggested that identity skip-connections enable ensemble-like behaviour of shallow networks, and that depth is not a solo ingredient for their success. Therefore, we examine the potential of identity skip-connections for the task of Speech Emotion Recognition (SER) where moderately deep temporal architectures are often employed. To this end, we propose a novel architecture which regulates unimpeded feature flows and captures long-term dependencies via gate-based skip-connections and a memory mechanism. Our proposed architecture is compared to other state-of-the-art methods of SER and is evaluated on large aggregated corpora recorded in different contexts. Our proposed architecture outperforms the state-of-the-art methods by 9 - 15 and achieves an Unweighted Accuracy of 80.5 in an imbalanced class distribution. In addition, we examine a variant adopting simplified skip-connections of Residual Networks (ResNet) and show that gate-based skip-connections are more effective than simplified skip-connections. While deeper convolutional networks are needed to achieve maximum accuracy in visual perception tasks, for many inputs shallower networks are sufficient. We exploit this observation by learning to skip convolutional layers on a per-input basis. We introduce SkipNet, a modified residual network, that uses a gating network to selectively skip convolutional blocks based on the activations of the previous layer. We formulate the dynamic skipping problem in the context of sequential decision making and propose a hybrid learning algorithm that combines supervised learning and reinforcement learning to address the challenges of non-differentiable skipping decisions. We show SkipNet reduces computation by (30-90 ) while preserving the accuracy of the original model on four benchmark datasets and outperforms the state-of-the-art dynamic networks and static compression methods. We also qualitatively evaluate the gating policy to reveal a relationship between image scale and saliency and the number of layers skipped. In this work, we present a simple, highly efficient and modularized Dual Path Network (DPN) for image classification which presents a new topology of connection paths internally. By revealing the equivalence of the state-of-the-art Residual Network (ResNet) and Densely Convolutional Network (DenseNet) within the HORNN framework, we find that ResNet enables feature re-usage while DenseNet enables new features exploration which are both important for learning good representations. To enjoy the benefits from both path topologies, our proposed Dual Path Network shares common features while maintaining the flexibility to explore new features through dual path architectures. Extensive experiments on three benchmark datasets, ImagNet-1k, Places365 and PASCAL VOC, clearly demonstrate superior performance of the proposed DPN over state-of-the-arts. In particular, on the ImagNet-1k dataset, a shallow DPN surpasses the best ResNeXt-101(64x4d) with 26 smaller model size, 25 less computational cost and 8 lower memory consumption, and a deeper DPN (DPN-131) further pushes the state-of-the-art single model performance with about 2 times faster training speed. Experiments on the Places365 large-scale scene dataset, PASCAL VOC detection dataset, and PASCAL VOC segmentation dataset also demonstrate its consistently better performance than DenseNet, ResNet and the latest ResNeXt model over various applications. In this work, we present a simple, highly efficient and modularized Dual Path Network (DPN) for image classification which presents a new topology of connection paths internally. By revealing the equivalence of the state-of-the-art Residual Network (ResNet) and Densely Convolutional Network (DenseNet) within the HORNN framework, we find that ResNet enables feature re-usage while DenseNet enables new features exploration which are both important for learning good representations. To enjoy the benefits from both path topologies, our proposed Dual Path Network shares common features while maintaining the flexibility to explore new features through dual path architectures. Extensive experiments on three benchmark datasets, ImagNet-1k, Places365 and PASCAL VOC, clearly demonstrate superior performance of the proposed DPN over state-of-the-arts. In particular, on the ImagNet-1k dataset, a shallow DPN surpasses the best ResNeXt-101(64x4d) with 26 smaller model size, 25 less computational cost and 8 lower memory consumption, and a deeper DPN (DPN-131) further pushes the state-of-the-art single model performance with about 2 times faster training speed. Experiments on the Places365 large-scale scene dataset, PASCAL VOC detection dataset, and PASCAL VOC segmentation dataset also demonstrate its consistently better performance than DenseNet, ResNet and the latest ResNeXt model over various applications.