Deep Complex Networks

At present, the vast majority of building blocks, techniques, and architectures for deep learning are based on real-valued operations and representations. However, recent work on recurrent neural networks and older fundamental theoretical analysis suggests that complex numbers could have a richer representational capacity and could also facilitate noise-robust memory retrieval mechanisms. Despite their attractive properties and potential for opening up entirely new neural architectures, complex-valued deep neural networks have been marginalized due to the absence of the building blocks required to design such models. In this work, we provide the key atomic components for complex-valued deep neural networks and apply them to convolutional feed-forward networks and convolutional LSTMs. More precisely, we rely on complex convolutions and present algorithms for complex batch-normalization, complex weight initialization strategies for complex-valued neural nets and we use them in experiments with end-to-end training schemes. We demonstrate that such complex-valued models are competitive with their real-valued counterparts. We test deep complex models on several computer vision tasks, on music transcription using the MusicNet dataset and on Speech Spectrum Prediction using the TIMIT dataset. We achieve state-of-the-art performance on these audio-related tasks

Quaternion Convolutional Neural Networks for End-to-End Automatic Speech Recognition

Recently, the connectionist temporal classification (CTC) model coupled with recurrent (RNN) or convolutional neural networks (CNN), made it easier to train speech recognition systems in an end-to-end fashion. However in real-valued models, time frame components such as mel-filter-bank energies and the cepstral coefficients obtained from them, together with their first and second order derivatives, are processed as individual elements, while a natural alternative is to process such components as composed entities. We propose to group such elements in the form of quaternions and to process these quaternions using the established quaternion algebra. Quaternion numbers and quaternion neural networks have shown their efficiency to process multidimensional inputs as entities, to encode internal dependencies, and to solve many tasks with less learning parameters than real-valued models. This paper proposes to integrate multiple feature views in quaternion-valued convolutional neural network (QCNN), to be used for sequence-to-sequence mapping with the CTC model. Promising results are reported using simple QCNNs in phoneme recognition experiments with the TIMIT corpus. More precisely, QCNNs obtain a lower phoneme error rate (PER) with less learning parameters than a competing model based on real-valued CNNs.Comment: Accepted at INTERSPEECH 201

Widely Linear Kernels for Complex-Valued Kernel Activation Functions

Complex-valued neural networks (CVNNs) have been shown to be powerful nonlinear approximators when the input data can be properly modeled in the complex domain. One of the major challenges in scaling up CVNNs in practice is the design of complex activation functions. Recently, we proposed a novel framework for learning these activation functions neuron-wise in a data-dependent fashion, based on a cheap one-dimensional kernel expansion and the idea of kernel activation functions (KAFs). In this paper we argue that, despite its flexibility, this framework is still limited in the class of functions that can be modeled in the complex domain. We leverage the idea of widely linear complex kernels to extend the formulation, allowing for a richer expressiveness without an increase in the number of adaptable parameters. We test the resulting model on a set of complex-valued image classification benchmarks. Experimental results show that the resulting CVNNs can achieve higher accuracy while at the same time converging faster.Comment: Accepted at ICASSP 201