In plain words: Instead of hand-picking one network design, this builds a 3D grid of connections holding exponentially many designs as paths, sharing weights where paths overlap. It reached results competitive with the best hand-designed networks on image classification and segmentation, with training cost growing only linearly with grid size.
Abstract
Despite the success of CNNs, selecting the optimal architecture for a given task remains an open problem. Instead of aiming to select a single optimal architecture, we propose a "fabric" that embeds an exponentially large number of architectures. The fabric consists of a 3D trellis that connects response maps at different layers, scales, and channels with a sparse homogeneous local connectivity pattern. The only hyper-parameters of a fabric are the number of channels and layers. While individual architectures can be recovered as paths, the fabric can in addition ensemble all embedded architectures together, sharing their weights where their paths overlap. Parameters can be learned using standard methods based on back-propagation, at a cost that scales linearly in the fabric size. We present benchmark results competitive with the state of the art for image classification on MNIST and CIFAR10, and for semantic segmentation on the Part Labels dataset.
Shreyas Saxena, Jakob Verbeek
arXiv:1606.02492 · cs.CV, cs.LG, cs.NE · submitted Jun 8, 2016 · updated Jan 30, 2017
abstract · pdf · html · Corrected typos (In proceedings of NIPS16 )