Accuracy Booster: Performance Boosting using Feature Map Re-calibration

Convolution Neural Networks (CNN) have been extremely successful in solving intensive computer vision tasks. The convolutional filters used in CNNs have played a major role in this success, by extracting useful features from the inputs. Recently researchers have tried to boost the performance of CNNs by re-calibrating the feature maps produced by these filters, e.g., Squeeze-and-Excitation Networks (SENets). These approaches have achieved better performance by Exciting up the important channels or feature maps while diminishing the rest. However, in the process, architectural complexity has increased. We propose an architectural block that introduces much lower complexity than the existing methods of CNN performance boosting while performing significantly better than them. We carry out experiments on the CIFAR, ImageNet and MS-COCO datasets, and show that the proposed block can challenge the state-of-the-art results. Our method boosts the ResNet-50 architecture to perform comparably to the ResNet-152 architecture, which is a three times deeper network, on classification. We also show experimentally that our method is not limited to classification but also generalizes well to other tasks such as object detection.Comment: IEEE Winter Conference on Applications of Computer Vision (WACV), 202

CPWC:Contextual Point Wise Convolution for Object Recognition

Convolutional layers are a major driving force behind the successes of deep learning. Pointwise convolution (PWC) is a 1x1 convolutional filter that is primarily used for parameter reduction. However, the PWC ignores the spatial information around the points it is processing. This design is by choice, in order to reduce the overall parameters and computations. However, we hypothesize that this shortcoming of PWC has a significant impact on the network performance. We propose an alternative design for pointwise convolution, which uses spatial information from the input efficiently. Our design significantly improves the performance of the networks without substantially increasing the number of parameters and computations. We experimentally show that our design results in significant improvement in the performance of the network for classification as well as detection.Comment: Accepted in ICASSP 202

Rectification-based Knowledge Retention for Task Incremental Learning

In the task incremental learning problem, deep learning models suffer from catastrophic forgetting of previously seen classes/tasks as they are trained on new classes/tasks. This problem becomes even harder when some of the test classes do not belong to the training class set, i.e., the task incremental generalized zero-shot learning problem. We propose a novel approach to address the task incremental learning problem for both the non zero-shot and zero-shot settings. Our proposed approach, called Rectification-based Knowledge Retention (RKR), applies weight rectifications and affine transformations for adapting the model to any task. During testing, our approach can use the task label information (task-aware) to quickly adapt the network to that task. We also extend our approach to make it task-agnostic so that it can work even when the task label information is not available during testing. Specifically, given a continuum of test data, our approach predicts the task and quickly adapts the network to the predicted task. We experimentally show that our proposed approach achieves state-of-the-art results on several benchmark datasets for both non zero-shot and zero-shot task incremental learning.</p