Conventional application of convolutional neural networks (CNNs) for image classification and recognition is based on the assumption that all target classes are equal(i.e., no hierarchy) and exclusive of one another (i.e., no overlap). CNN-based image classifiers built on this assumption, therefore, cannot take into account an innate hierarchy among target classes (e.g., cats and dogs in animal image classification) or additional information that can be easily derived from the data (e.g.,numbers larger than five in the recognition of handwritten digits), thereby resulting in scalability issues when the number of target classes is large. Combining two related but slightly different ideas of hierarchical classification and logical learning by auxiliary inputs, we propose a new learning framework called hierarchical auxiliary learning, which not only address the scalability issues with a large number of classes but also could further reduce the classification recognition errors with a reasonable number of classes. In the hierarchical auxiliary learning, target classes are semantically or non-semantically grouped into superclasses, which turns the original problem of mapping between an image and its target class into a new problem of mapping between a pair of an image and its superclass and the target class. To take the advantage of superclasses, we introduce an auxiliary block into a neural network, which generates auxiliary scores used as additional information for final classification recognition; in this paper, we add the auxiliary block between the last residual block and the fully-connected output layer of the ResNet. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed hierarchical auxiliary learning can reduce classification errors up to 0.56, 1.6 and 3.56 percent with MNIST, SVHN and CIFAR-10 datasets, respectively.
Auxiliary information from the input data also improves the performance. In the stage-wise learning, coarse to finer images, which are subsampled from the original images, are fed to the network step by step to enhance the learning process @cite_22 . The ROCK architecture introduces an auxiliary block which can perform multiple tasks of extracting useful information from the input and inserting it to the input for a main task @cite_18 .
@cite_18 @cite_22
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Multi-Task Learning (MTL) is appealing for deep learning regularization. In this paper, we tackle a specific MTL context denoted as primary MTL, where the ultimate goal is to improve the performance of a given primary task by leveraging several other auxiliary tasks. Our main methodological contribution is to introduce ROCK, a new generic multi-modal fusion block for deep learning tailored to the primary MTL context. ROCK architecture is based on a residual connection, which makes forward prediction explicitly impacted by the intermediate auxiliary representations. The auxiliary predictor's architecture is also specifically designed to our primary MTL context, by incorporating intensive pooling operators for maximizing complementarity of intermediate representations. Extensive experiments on NYUv2 dataset (object detection with scene classification, depth prediction, and surface normal estimation as auxiliary tasks) validate the relevance of the approach and its superiority to flat MTL approaches. Our method outperforms state-of-the-art object detection models on NYUv2 by a large margin, and is also able to handle large-scale heterogeneous inputs (real and synthetic images) and missing annotation modalities. Deep neural networks currently stand at the state of the art for many machine learning applications, yet there still remain limitations in the training of such networks because of their very high parameter dimensionality. In this paper we show that network training performance can be improved using a stage-wise learning strategy, in which the learning process is broken down into a number of related sub-tasks that are completed stage-bystage. The idea is to inject the information to the network gradually so that in the early stages of training the -scale" properties of the data are captured while the " characteristics are learned in later stages. Moreover, the solution found in each stage serves as a prior to the next stage, which produces a regularization eect and enhances the generalization of the learned representations. We show that decoupling the classier layer from the feature extraction layers of the network is necessary, as it alleviates the diusion of gradient and over-tting problems. Experimental results in the context of image classication support these claims.