Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) achieve impressive performance in a wide variety of fields. Their success benefited from a massive boost when very deep CNN models were able to be reliably trained. Despite their merits, CNNs fail to properly address problems with non-Euclidean data. To overcome this challenge, Graph Convolutional Networks (GCNs) build graphs to represent non-Euclidean data, borrow concepts from CNNs, and apply them in training. GCNs show promising results, but they are usually limited to very shallow models due to the vanishing gradient problem. As a result, most state-of-the-art GCN models are no deeper than 3 or 4 layers. In this work, we present new ways to successfully train very deep GCNs. We do this by borrowing concepts from CNNs, specifically residual dense connections and dilated convolutions, and adapting them to GCN architectures. Extensive experiments show the positive effect of these deep GCN frameworks. Finally, we use these new concepts to build a very deep 56-layer GCN, and show how it significantly boosts performance (+3.7 mIoU over state-of-the-art) in the task of point cloud semantic segmentation. We believe that the community can greatly benefit from this work, as it opens up many opportunities for advancing GCN-based research.
A lot of the difficulties that face GCNs nowadays ( vanishing gradients, limited receptive field, ) were also present in the early days of CNNs @cite_11 @cite_26 . We bridge this gap and show that the majority of these drawbacks can be remedied by borrowing several orthogonal tricks from CNNs. Deep CNNs achieved a huge boost in performance with the introduction of ResNet @cite_11 . By adding residual connections between inputs and outputs of layers, ResNet alleviates the vanishing gradient problem. DenseNet @cite_48 takes this idea a step further and adds connections across layers as well. Dilated Convolutions @cite_26 are a more recent approach that has lead to significant performance gains, specifically in image-to-image translation tasks such as semantic segmentation @cite_26 , by increasing the receptive field without loss of resolution. We show how we can benefit from these concepts introduced for CNNs, mainly residual dense connections and dilated convolutions, to train very deep GCNs. We support our claim by extending the work of Wang al @cite_35 to a much deeper GCN, and therefore significantly increasing its performance. Extensive experiments on the task of point cloud semantic segmentation validate that these ideas could be used in any general graph scenario.
@cite_48 @cite_26 @cite_35 @cite_11
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Recently, very deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have shown outstanding performance in object recognition and have also been the first choice for dense classification problems such as semantic segmentation. However, repeated subsampling operations like pooling or convolution striding in deep CNNs lead to a significant decrease in the initial image resolution. Here, we present RefineNet, a generic multi-path refinement network that explicitly exploits all the information available along the down-sampling process to enable high-resolution prediction using long-range residual connections. In this way, the deeper layers that capture high-level semantic features can be directly refined using fine-grained features from earlier convolutions. The individual components of RefineNet employ residual connections following the identity mapping mindset, which allows for effective end-to-end training. Further, we introduce chained residual pooling, which captures rich background context in an efficient manner. We carry out comprehensive experiments and set new state-of-the-art results on seven public datasets. In particular, we achieve an intersection-over-union score of 83.4 on the challenging PASCAL VOC 2012 dataset, which is the best reported result to date. Recently, very deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have shown outstanding performance in object recognition and have also been the first choice for dense classification problems such as semantic segmentation. However, repeated subsampling operations like pooling or convolution striding in deep CNNs lead to a significant decrease in the initial image resolution. Here, we present RefineNet, a generic multi-path refinement network that explicitly exploits all the information available along the down-sampling process to enable high-resolution prediction using long-range residual connections. In this way, the deeper layers that capture high-level semantic features can be directly refined using fine-grained features from earlier convolutions. The individual components of RefineNet employ residual connections following the identity mapping mindset, which allows for effective end-to-end training. Further, we introduce chained residual pooling, which captures rich background context in an efficient manner. We carry out comprehensive experiments and set new state-of-the-art results on seven public datasets. In particular, we achieve an intersection-over-union score of 83.4 on the challenging PASCAL VOC 2012 dataset, which is the best reported result to date. Recent advances in deep learning, especially deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs), have led to significant improvement over previous semantic segmentation systems. Here we show how to improve pixel-wise semantic segmentation by manipulating convolution-related operations that are of both theoretical and practical value. First, we design dense upsampling convolution (DUC) to generate pixel-level prediction, which is able to capture and decode more detailed information that is generally missing in bilinear upsampling. Second, we propose a hybrid dilated convolution (HDC) framework in the encoding phase. This framework 1) effectively enlarges the receptive fields (RF) of the network to aggregate global information; 2) alleviates what we call the "gridding issue" caused by the standard dilated convolution operation. We evaluate our approaches thoroughly on the Cityscapes dataset, and achieve a state-of-art result of 80.1 mIOU in the test set at the time of submission. We also have achieved state-of-the-art overall on the KITTI road estimation benchmark and the PASCAL VOC2012 segmentation task. Our source code can be found at this https URL . State-of-the-art semantic segmentation approaches increase the receptive field of their models by using either a downsampling path composed of poolings strided convolutions or successive dilated convolutions. However, it is not clear which operation leads to best results. In this paper, we systematically study the differences introduced by distinct receptive field enlargement methods and their impact on the performance of a novel architecture, called Fully Convolutional DenseResNet (FC-DRN). FC-DRN has a densely connected backbone composed of residual networks. Following standard image segmentation architectures, receptive field enlargement operations that change the representation level are interleaved among residual networks. This allows the model to exploit the benefits of both residual and dense connectivity patterns, namely: gradient flow, iterative refinement of representations, multi-scale feature combination and deep supervision. In order to highlight the potential of our model, we test it on the challenging CamVid urban scene understanding benchmark and make the following observations: 1) downsampling operations outperform dilations when the model is trained from scratch, 2) dilations are useful during the finetuning step of the model, 3) coarser representations require less refinement steps, and 4) ResNets (by model construction) are good regularizers, since they can reduce the model capacity when needed. Finally, we compare our architecture to alternative methods and report state-of-the-art result on the Camvid dataset, with at least twice fewer parameters.