161 research outputs found
Bottom-Up and Top-Down Reasoning with Hierarchical Rectified Gaussians
Convolutional neural nets (CNNs) have demonstrated remarkable performance in
recent history. Such approaches tend to work in a unidirectional bottom-up
feed-forward fashion. However, practical experience and biological evidence
tells us that feedback plays a crucial role, particularly for detailed spatial
understanding tasks. This work explores bidirectional architectures that also
reason with top-down feedback: neural units are influenced by both lower and
higher-level units.
We do so by treating units as rectified latent variables in a quadratic
energy function, which can be seen as a hierarchical Rectified Gaussian model
(RGs). We show that RGs can be optimized with a quadratic program (QP), that
can in turn be optimized with a recurrent neural network (with rectified linear
units). This allows RGs to be trained with GPU-optimized gradient descent. From
a theoretical perspective, RGs help establish a connection between CNNs and
hierarchical probabilistic models. From a practical perspective, RGs are well
suited for detailed spatial tasks that can benefit from top-down reasoning. We
illustrate them on the challenging task of keypoint localization under
occlusions, where local bottom-up evidence may be misleading. We demonstrate
state-of-the-art results on challenging benchmarks.Comment: To appear in CVPR 201
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