Spatially-Adaptive Filter Units for Compact and Efficient Deep Neural Networks

Convolutional neural networks excel in a number of computer vision tasks. One of their most crucial architectural elements is the effective receptive field size, that has to be manually set to accommodate a specific task. Standard solutions involve large kernels, down/up-sampling and dilated convolutions. These require testing a variety of dilation and down/up-sampling factors and result in non-compact representations and excessive number of parameters. We address this issue by proposing a new convolution filter composed of displaced aggregation units (DAU). DAUs learn spatial displacements and adapt the receptive field sizes of individual convolution filters to a given problem, thus eliminating the need for hand-crafted modifications. DAUs provide a seamless substitution of convolutional filters in existing state-of-the-art architectures, which we demonstrate on AlexNet, ResNet50, ResNet101, DeepLab and SRN-DeblurNet. The benefits of this design are demonstrated on a variety of computer vision tasks and datasets, such as image classification (ILSVRC 2012), semantic segmentation (PASCAL VOC 2011, Cityscape) and blind image de-blurring (GOPRO). Results show that DAUs efficiently allocate parameters resulting in up to four times more compact networks at similar or better performance.Comment: Accepted for publication in International Journal of Computer Vision, Jan 02 202

Attributed Graph Classification via Deep Graph Convolutional Neural Networks

From social networks to biological networks, graphs are a natural way to represent a diverse set of real-world data. This research presents attributed graph convolutional neural network with a pooling layer (AGCP for short), a novel end-to-end deep neural network model which captures the higher-order latent attributes of weighted, labeled, undirected, attributed graphs of arbitrary size. The architecture of AGCP is an efficient variant of convolutional neural network (CNN) and has a linear filter function that convolves over the fixed topological structure of a graph to learn local and global attributes of the graph. Convolution is followed by a pooling layer that coarsens the graph while preserving the global structure of the original input graph using information gain. On the other hand, advances in high throughput technologies for next-generation sequencing have enabled machine learning research to acquire and extract knowledge from biological networks. We apply AGCP on three bioinformatics networks, ENZYMES, D&D, and GINA a graph dataset of gene interaction networks with genomic mutation attributes as the attributes of the vertices. In several experiments on these datasets, we demonstrate that AGCP yields better results in terms of classification accuracy relative to the previously proposed models by a considerable margin