Convolutional neural networks have gained a remarkable success in computer vision. However, most usable network architectures are hand-crafted and usually require expertise and elaborate design. In this paper, we provide a block-wise network generation pipeline called BlockQNN which automatically builds high-performance networks using the Q-Learning paradigm with epsilon-greedy exploration strategy. The optimal network block is constructed by the learning agent which is trained sequentially to choose component layers. We stack the block to construct the whole auto-generated network. To accelerate the generation process, we also propose a distributed asynchronous framework and an early stop strategy. The block-wise generation brings unique advantages: (1) it performs competitive results in comparison to the hand-crafted state-of-the-art networks on image classification, additionally, the best network generated by BlockQNN achieves 3.54 top-1 error rate on CIFAR-10 which beats all existing auto-generate networks. (2) in the meanwhile, it offers tremendous reduction of the search space in designing networks which only spends 3 days with 32 GPUs, and (3) moreover, it has strong generalizability that the network built on CIFAR also performs well on a larger-scale ImageNet dataset.
Instead, our approach is aimed to design network block architecture by an efficient search method with a distributed asynchronous Q-learning framework as well as an early-stop strategy. The block design conception follows the modern convolutional neural networks such as Inception @cite_5 @cite_34 @cite_15 and Resnet @cite_32 @cite_16 . The inception-based networks construct the inception blocks via a hand-crafted multi-level feature extractor strategy by computing @math , @math , and @math convolutions, while the Resnet uses residue blocks with shortcut connection to make it easier to represent the identity mapping which allows a very deep network. The blocks automatically generated by our approach have similar structures such as some blocks contain short cut connections and inception-like multi-branch combination. We will discuss the details in .
@cite_32 @cite_16 @cite_5 @cite_15 @cite_34
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Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have revolutionized medical image analysis over the past few years. The U-Net architecture is one of the most well-known CNN architectures for semantic segmentation and has achieved remarkable successes in many different medical image segmentation applications. The U-Net architecture consists of standard convolution layers, pooling layers, and upsampling layers. These convolution layers learn representative features of input images and construct segmentations based on the features. However, the features learned by standard convolution layers are not distinctive when the differences among different categories are subtle in terms of intensity, location, shape, and size. In this paper, we propose a novel CNN architecture, called Dense-Res-Inception Net (DRINet), which addresses this challenging problem. The proposed DRINet consists of three blocks, namely a convolutional block with dense connections, a deconvolutional block with residual inception modules, and an unpooling block. Our proposed architecture outperforms the U-Net in three different challenging applications, namely multi-class segmentation of cerebrospinal fluid on brain CT images, multi-organ segmentation on abdominal CT images, and multi-class brain tumor segmentation on MR images. Convolutional neural network provides an end-to-end solution to train many computer vision tasks and has gained great successes. However, the design of network architectures usually relies heavily on expert knowledge and is hand-crafted. In this paper, we provide a solution to automatically and efficiently design high performance network architectures. To reduce the search space of network design, we focus on constructing network blocks, which can be stacked to generate the whole network. Blocks are generated through an agent, which is trained with Q-learning to maximize the expected accuracy of the searching blocks on the learning task. Distributed asynchronous framework and early stop strategy are used to accelerate the training process. Our experimental results demonstrate that the network architectures designed by our approach perform competitively compared with hand-crafted state-of-the-art networks. We trained the Q-learning on CIFAR-100, and evaluated on CIFAR10 and ImageNet, the designed block structure achieved 3.60 error on CIFAR-10 and competitive result on ImageNet. The Q-learning process can be efficiently trained only on 32 GPUs in 3 days. Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) have been regarded as a powerful class of models for image recognition problems. Nevertheless, it is not trivial when utilizing a CNN for learning spatio-temporal video representation. A few studies have shown that performing 3D convolutions is a rewarding approach to capture both spatial and temporal dimensions in videos. However, the development of a very deep 3D CNN from scratch results in expensive computational cost and memory demand. A valid question is why not recycle off-the-shelf 2D networks for a 3D CNN. In this paper, we devise multiple variants of bottleneck building blocks in a residual learning framework by simulating @math convolutions with @math convolutional filters on spatial domain (equivalent to 2D CNN) plus @math convolutions to construct temporal connections on adjacent feature maps in time. Furthermore, we propose a new architecture, named Pseudo-3D Residual Net (P3D ResNet), that exploits all the variants of blocks but composes each in different placement of ResNet, following the philosophy that enhancing structural diversity with going deep could improve the power of neural networks. Our P3D ResNet achieves clear improvements on Sports-1M video classification dataset against 3D CNN and frame-based 2D CNN by 5.3 and 1.8 , respectively. We further examine the generalization performance of video representation produced by our pre-trained P3D ResNet on five different benchmarks and three different tasks, demonstrating superior performances over several state-of-the-art techniques. Convolutional neural networks have gained a remarkable success in computer vision. However, most usable network architectures are hand-crafted and usually require expertise and elaborate design. In this paper, we provide a block-wise network generation pipeline called BlockQNN which automatically builds high-performance networks using the Q-Learning paradigm with epsilon-greedy exploration strategy. The optimal network block is constructed by the learning agent which is trained sequentially to choose component layers. We stack the block to construct the whole auto-generated network. To accelerate the generation process, we also propose a distributed asynchronous framework and an early stop strategy. The block-wise generation brings unique advantages: (1) it performs competitive results in comparison to the hand-crafted state-of-the-art networks on image classification, additionally, the best network generated by BlockQNN achieves 3.54 top-1 error rate on CIFAR-10 which beats all existing auto-generate networks. (2) in the meanwhile, it offers tremendous reduction of the search space in designing networks which only spends 3 days with 32 GPUs, and (3) moreover, it has strong generalizability that the network built on CIFAR also performs well on a larger-scale ImageNet dataset. This paper presents how we can achieve the state-of-the-art accuracy in multi-category object detection task while minimizing the computational cost by adapting and combining recent technical innovations. Following the common pipeline of "CNN feature extraction + region proposal + RoI classification", we mainly redesign the feature extraction part, since region proposal part is not computationally expensive and classification part can be efficiently compressed with common techniques like truncated SVD. Our design principle is "less channels with more layers" and adoption of some building blocks including concatenated ReLU, Inception, and HyperNet. The designed network is deep and thin and trained with the help of batch normalization, residual connections, and learning rate scheduling based on plateau detection. We obtained solid results on well-known object detection benchmarks: 83.8 mAP (mean average precision) on VOC2007 and 82.5 mAP on VOC2012 (2nd place), while taking only 750ms image on Intel i7-6700K CPU with a single core and 46ms image on NVIDIA Titan X GPU. Theoretically, our network requires only 12.3 of the computational cost compared to ResNet-101, the winner on VOC2012. Deep residual networks have emerged as a family of extremely deep architectures showing compelling accuracy and nice convergence behaviors. In this paper, we analyze the propagation formulations behind the residual building blocks, which suggest that the forward and backward signals can be directly propagated from one block to any other block, when using identity mappings as the skip connections and after-addition activation. A series of ablation experiments support the importance of these identity mappings. This motivates us to propose a new residual unit, which makes training easier and improves generalization. We report improved results using a 1001-layer ResNet on CIFAR-10 (4.62 error) and CIFAR-100, and a 200-layer ResNet on ImageNet. Code is available at: https: github.com KaimingHe resnet-1k-layers. Deep residual networks have emerged as a family of extremely deep architectures showing compelling accuracy and nice convergence behaviors. In this paper, we analyze the propagation formulations behind the residual building blocks, which suggest that the forward and backward signals can be directly propagated from one block to any other block, when using identity mappings as the skip connections and after-addition activation. A series of ablation experiments support the importance of these identity mappings. This motivates us to propose a new residual unit, which makes training easier and improves generalization. We report improved results using a 1001-layer ResNet on CIFAR-10 (4.62 error) and CIFAR-100, and a 200-layer ResNet on ImageNet. Code is available at: this https URL Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) have been regarded as a powerful class of models for image recognition problems. Nevertheless, it is not trivial when utilizing a CNN for learning spatio-temporal video representation. A few studies have shown that performing 3D convolutions is a rewarding approach to capture both spatial and temporal dimensions in videos. However, the development of a very deep 3D CNN from scratch results in expensive computational cost and memory demand. A valid question is why not recycle off-the-shelf 2D networks for a 3D CNN. In this paper, we devise multiple variants of bottleneck building blocks in a residual learning framework by simulating 3 x 3 x 3 convolutions with 1 × 3 × 3 convolutional filters on spatial domain (equivalent to 2D CNN) plus 3 × 1 × 1 convolutions to construct temporal connections on adjacent feature maps in time. Furthermore, we propose a new architecture, named Pseudo-3D Residual Net (P3D ResNet), that exploits all the variants of blocks but composes each in different placement of ResNet, following the philosophy that enhancing structural diversity with going deep could improve the power of neural networks. Our P3D ResNet achieves clear improvements on Sports-1M video classification dataset against 3D CNN and frame-based 2D CNN by 5.3 and 1.8 , respectively. We further examine the generalization performance of video representation produced by our pre-trained P3D ResNet on five different benchmarks and three different tasks, demonstrating superior performances over several state-of-the-art techniques. Very deep convolutional networks have been central to the largest advances in image recognition performance in recent years. One example is the Inception architecture that has been shown to achieve very good performance at relatively low computational cost. Recently, the introduction of residual connections in conjunction with a more traditional architecture has yielded state-of-the-art performance in the 2015 ILSVRC challenge; its performance was similar to the latest generation Inception-v3 network. This raises the question: Are there any benefits to combining Inception architectures with residual connections? Here we give clear empirical evidence that training with residual connections accelerates the training of Inception networks significantly. There is also some evidence of residual Inception networks outperforming similarly expensive Inception networks without residual connections by a thin margin. We also present several new streamlined architectures for both residual and non-residual Inception networks. These variations improve the single-frame recognition performance on the ILSVRC 2012 classification task significantly. We further demonstrate how proper activation scaling stabilizes the training of very wide residual Inception networks. With an ensemble of three residual and one Inception-v4 networks, we achieve 3.08 top-5 error on the test set of the ImageNet classification (CLS) challenge. Very deep convolutional networks have been central to the largest advances in image recognition performance in recent years. One example is the Inception architecture that has been shown to achieve very good performance at relatively low computational cost. Recently, the introduction of residual connections in conjunction with a more traditional architecture has yielded state-of-the-art performance in the 2015 ILSVRC challenge; its performance was similar to the latest generation Inception-v3 network. This raises the question of whether there are any benefit in combining the Inception architecture with residual connections. Here we give clear empirical evidence that training with residual connections accelerates the training of Inception networks significantly. There is also some evidence of residual Inception networks outperforming similarly expensive Inception networks without residual connections by a thin margin. We also present several new streamlined architectures for both residual and non-residual Inception networks. These variations improve the single-frame recognition performance on the ILSVRC 2012 classification task significantly. We further demonstrate how proper activation scaling stabilizes the training of very wide residual Inception networks. With an ensemble of three residual and one Inception-v4, we achieve 3.08 percent top-5 error on the test set of the ImageNet classification (CLS) challenge Residual networks (Resnets) have become a prominent architecture in deep learning. However, a comprehensive understanding of Resnets is still a topic of ongoing research. A recent view argues that Resnets perform iterative refinement of features. We attempt to further expose properties of this aspect. To this end, we study Resnets both analytically and empirically. We formalize the notion of iterative refinement in Resnets by showing that residual connections naturally encourage features of residual blocks to move along the negative gradient of loss as we go from one block to the next. In addition, our empirical analysis suggests that Resnets are able to perform both representation learning and iterative refinement. In general, a Resnet block tends to concentrate representation learning behavior in the first few layers while higher layers perform iterative refinement of features. Finally we observe that sharing residual layers naively leads to representation explosion and counterintuitively, overfitting, and we show that simple existing strategies can help alleviating this problem. U-Net has been providing state-of-the-art performance in many medical image segmentation problems. Many modifications have been proposed for U-Net, such as attention U-Net, recurrent residual convolutional U-Net (R2-UNet), and U-Net with residual blocks or blocks with dense connections. However, all these modifications have an encoder-decoder structure with skip connections, and the number of paths for information flow is limited. We propose LadderNet in this paper, which can be viewed as a chain of multiple U-Nets. Instead of only one pair of encoder branch and decoder branch in U-Net, a LadderNet has multiple pairs of encoder-decoder branches, and has skip connections between every pair of adjacent decoder and decoder branches in each level. Inspired by the success of ResNet and R2-UNet, we use modified residual blocks where two convolutional layers in one block share the same weights. A LadderNet has more paths for information flow because of skip connections and residual blocks, and can be viewed as an ensemble of Fully Convolutional Networks (FCN). The equivalence to an ensemble of FCNs improves segmentation accuracy, while the shared weights within each residual block reduce parameter number. Semantic segmentation is essential for retinal disease detection. We tested LadderNet on two benchmark datasets for blood vessel segmentation in retinal images, and achieved superior performance over methods in the literature. The implementation is provided https: github.com juntang-zhuang LadderNet Residual networks, which use a residual unit to supplement the identity mappings, enable very deep convolutional architecture to operate well, however, the residual architecture has been proved to be diverse and redundant, which may leads to low-efficient modeling. In this work, we propose a competitive squeeze-excitation (SE) mechanism for the residual network. Re-scaling the value for each channel in this structure will be determined by the residual and identity mappings jointly, and this design enables us to expand the meaning of channel relationship modeling in residual blocks. Modeling of the competition between residual and identity mappings cause the identity flow to control the complement of the residual feature maps for itself. Furthermore, we design a novel inner-imaging competitive SE block to shrink the consumption and re-image the global features of intermediate network structure, by using the inner-imaging mechanism, we can model the channel-wise relations with convolution in spatial. We carry out experiments on the CIFAR, SVHN, and ImageNet datasets, and the proposed method can challenge state-of-the-art results. The 3D convolutional neural network (CNN) is able to make full use of the spatial 3D context information of lung nodules, and the multi-view strategy has been shown to be useful for improving the performance of 2D CNN in classifying lung nodules. In this paper, we explore the classification of lung nodules using the 3D multi-view convolutional neural networks (MV-CNN) with both chain architecture and directed acyclic graph architecture, including 3D Inception and 3D Inception-ResNet. All networks employ the multi-view-one-network strategy. We conduct a binary classification (benign and malignant) and a ternary classification (benign, primary malignant and metastatic malignant) on Computed Tomography (CT) images from Lung Image Database Consortium and Image Database Resource Initiative database (LIDC-IDRI). All results are obtained via 10-fold cross validation. As regards the MV-CNN with chain architecture, results show that the performance of 3D MV-CNN surpasses that of 2D MV-CNN by a significant margin. Finally, a 3D Inception network achieved an error rate of 4.59 for the binary classification and 7.70 for the ternary classification, both of which represent superior results for the corresponding task. We compare the multi-view-one-network strategy with the one-view-one-network strategy. The results reveal that the multi-view-one-network strategy can achieve a lower error rate than the one-view-one-network strategy. We present an interpretation of Inception modules in convolutional neural networks as being an intermediate step in-between regular convolution and the depthwise separable convolution operation (a depthwise convolution followed by a pointwise convolution). In this light, a depthwise separable convolution can be understood as an Inception module with a maximally large number of towers. This observation leads us to propose a novel deep convolutional neural network architecture inspired by Inception, where Inception modules have been replaced with depthwise separable convolutions. We show that this architecture, dubbed Xception, slightly outperforms Inception V3 on the ImageNet dataset (which Inception V3 was designed for), and significantly outperforms Inception V3 on a larger image classification dataset comprising 350 million images and 17,000 classes. Since the Xception architecture has the same number of parameters as Inception V3, the performance gains are not due to increased capacity but rather to a more efficient use of model parameters. Inspired by the recent advances of image super-resolution using convolutional neural network (CNN), we propose a CNN-based block up-sampling scheme for intra frame coding. A block can be down-sampled before being compressed by normal intra coding, and then up-sampled to its original resolution. Different from previous studies on down up-sampling-based coding, the up-sampling methods in our scheme have been designed by training CNN instead of hand-crafted. We explore a new CNN structure for up-sampling, which features deconvolution of feature maps, multi-scale fusion, and residue learning, making the network both compact and efficient. We also design different networks for the up-sampling of luma and chroma components, respectively, where the chroma up-sampling CNN utilizes the luma information to boost its performance. In addition, we design a two-stage up-sampling process, the first stage being within the block-by-block coding loop, and the second stage being performed on the entire frame, so as to refine block boundaries. We also empirically study how to set the coding parameters of down-sampled blocks for pursuing the frame-level rate-distortion optimization. Our proposed scheme is implemented into the high-efficiency video coding (HEVC) reference software, and a comprehensive set of experiments have been performed to evaluate our methods. Experimental results show that our scheme achieves significant bits saving compared with the HEVC anchor, especially at low bit rates, leading to on average 5.5 BD-rate reduction on common test sequences and on average 9.0 BD-rate reduction on ultrahigh definition test sequences. Abstract We present a numerical framework for approximating unknown governing equations using observation data and deep neural networks (DNN). In particular, we propose to use residual network (ResNet) as the basic building block for equation approximation. We demonstrate that the ResNet block can be considered as a one-step method that is exact in temporal integration. We then present two multi-step methods, recurrent ResNet (RT-ResNet) method and recursive ReNet (RS-ResNet) method. The RT-ResNet is a multi-step method on uniform time steps, whereas the RS-ResNet is an adaptive multi-step method using variable time steps. All three methods presented here are based on integral form of the underlying dynamical system. As a result, they do not require time derivative data for equation recovery and can cope with relatively coarsely distributed trajectory data. Several numerical examples are presented to demonstrate the performance of the methods. Food diary applications represent a tantalizing market. Such applications, based on image food recognition, opened to new challenges for computer vision and pattern recognition algorithms. Recent works in the field are focusing either on hand-crafted representations or on learning these by exploiting deep neural networks. Despite the success of such a last family of works, these generally exploit off-the shelf deep architectures to classify food dishes. Thus, the architectures are not cast to the specific problem. We believe that better results can be obtained if the deep architecture is defined with respect to an analysis of the food composition. Following such an intuition, this work introduces a new deep scheme that is designed to handle the food structure. Specifically, inspired by the recent success of residual deep network, we exploit such a learning scheme and introduce a slice convolution block to capture the vertical food layers. Outputs of the deep residual blocks are combined with the sliced convolution to produce the classification score for specific food categories. To evaluate our proposed architecture we have conducted experimental results on three benchmark datasets. Results demonstrate that our solution shows better performance with respect to existing approaches (e.g., a top-1 accuracy of 90.27 on the Food-101 challenging dataset). With the rapid development of Deep Convolutional Neural Networks (DCNNs), numerous works focus on designing better network architectures (i.e., AlexNet, VGG, Inception, ResNet and DenseNet etc.). Nevertheless, all these networks have the same characteristic: each convolutional layer is followed by an activation layer, a Rectified Linear Unit (ReLU) layer is the most used among them. In this work, we argue that the paired module with 1:1 convolution and ReLU ratio is not the best choice since it may result in poor generalization ability. Thus, we try to investigate the more suitable convolution and ReLU ratio for exploring the better network architectures. Specifically, inspired by Leaky ReLU, we focus on adopting the proportional module with N:M (N @math M) convolution and ReLU ratio to design the better networks. From the perspective of ensemble learning, Leaky ReLU can be considered as an ensemble of networks with different convolution and ReLU ratio. We find that the proportional module with N:M (N @math M) convolution and ReLU ratio can help networks acquire the better performance, through the analysis of a simple Leaky ReLU model. By utilizing the proportional module with N:M (N @math M) convolution and ReLU ratio, many popular networks can form more rich representations in models, since the N:M (N @math M) proportional module can utilize information more effectively. Furthermore, we apply this module in diverse DCNN models to explore whether is the N:M (N @math M) convolution and ReLU ratio indeed more effective. From our experimental results, we can find that such a simple yet effective method achieves better performance in different benchmarks with various network architectures and the experimental results verify that the superiority of the proportional module. We present the Video Ladder Network (VLN) for efficiently generating future video frames. VLN is a neural encoder-decoder model augmented at all layers by both recurrent and feedforward lateral connections. At each layer, these connections form a lateral recurrent residual block, where the feedforward connection represents a skip connection and the recurrent connection represents the residual. Thanks to the recurrent connections, the decoder can exploit temporal summaries generated from all layers of the encoder. This way, the top layer is relieved from the pressure of modeling lower-level spatial and temporal details. Furthermore, we extend the basic version of VLN to incorporate ResNet-style residual blocks in the encoder and decoder, which help improving the prediction results. VLN is trained in self-supervised regime on the Moving MNIST dataset, achieving competitive results while having very simple structure and providing fast inference.