Instantaneously trained neural networks with complex and quaternion inputs

Neural network architectures such as backpropagation networks, perceptrons or generalized Hopfield networks can handle complex inputs but they require a large amount of time and resources for the training process. This thesis investigates instantaneously trained feedforward neural networks that can handle complex and quaternion inputs. The performance of the basic algorithm has been analyzed and shown how it provides a plausible model of human perception and understanding of images. The motivation for studying quaternion inputs is their use in representing spatial rotations that find applications in computer graphics, robotics, global navigation, computer vision and the spatial orientation of instruments. The problem of efficient mapping of data in quaternion neural networks is examined. Some problems that need to be addressed before quaternion neural networks find applications are identified

Quaternion Neural Networks for Sequence Classification

Recently the field of deep learning has made significant advancement, included in this category is the subject of sequence classification. Recent research has shown that traditional sequence processing deep learning architectures such as the Long Short-Term Memory cell (LSTM) or the Gated Recurrent Unit (GRU) can be replaced by Dilated Fully Convolutional Networks called a Temporal Convolutional Network (TCN). Other research has shown that by representing deep networks with complex and quaternion numbers, the networks tend to show improved convergence while using significantly less learned parameters. We combine these two observations to create a Quaternion Temporal Convolution Network (QTCN), and show its performance on sequential classification tasks.https://ecommons.udayton.edu/stander_posters/2447/thumbnail.jp

Isotropization of Quaternion-Neural-Network-Based PolSAR Adaptive Land Classification in Poincare-Sphere Parameter Space

Quaternion neural networks (QNNs) achieve high accuracy in polarimetric synthetic aperture radar classification for various observation data by working in Poincare-sphere-parameter space. The high performance arises from the good generalization characteristics realized by a QNN as 3-D rotation as well as amplification/attenuation, which is in good consistency with the isotropy in the polarization-state representation it deals with. However, there are still two anisotropic factors so far which lead to a classification capability degraded from its ideal performance. In this letter, we propose an isotropic variation vector and an isotropic activation function to improve the classification ability. Experiments demonstrate the enhancement of the QNN ability

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

Compressing deep-quaternion neural networks with targeted regularisation

In recent years, hyper-complex deep networks (such as complex-valued and quaternion-valued neural networks - QVNNs) have received a renewed interest in the literature. They find applications in multiple fields, ranging from image reconstruction to 3D audio processing. Similar to their real-valued counterparts, quaternion neural networks require custom regularisation strategies to avoid overfitting. In addition, for many real-world applications and embedded implementations, there is the need of designing sufficiently compact networks, with few weights and neurons. However, the problem of regularising and/or sparsifying QVNNs has not been properly addressed in the literature as of now. In this study, the authors show how to address both problems by designing targeted regularisation strategies, which can minimise the number of connections and neurons of the network during training. To this end, they investigate two extensions of l1and structured regularisations to the quaternion domain. In the authors' experimental evaluation, they show that these tailored strategies significantly outperform classical (realvalued) regularisation approaches, resulting in small networks especially suitable for low-power and real-time applications

Deep quaternion neural networks for spoken language understanding

International audienceThe availability of open-source software is playing a remarkable role in the popularization of speech recognition and deep learning. Kaldi, for instance, is nowadays an established framework used to develop state-of-the-art speech recognizers. PyTorch is used to build neural networks with the Python language and has recently spawn tremendous interest within the machine learning community thanks to its simplicity and flexibility. The PyTorch-Kaldi project aims to bridge the gap between these popular toolkits, trying to inherit the efficiency of Kaldi and the flexibility of PyTorch. PyTorch-Kaldi is not only a simple interface between these software, but it embeds several useful features for developing modern speech recognizers. For instance, the code is specifically designed to naturally plug-in user-defined acoustic models. As an alternative, users can exploit several pre-implemented neural networks that can be customized using intuitive configuration files. PyTorch-Kaldi supports multiple feature and label streams as well as combinations of neural networks, enabling the use of complex neural architectures. The toolkit is publicly-released along with a rich documentation and is designed to properly work locally or on HPC clusters. Experiments, that are conducted on several datasets and tasks, show that PyTorch-Kaldi can effectively be used to develop modern state-of-the-art speech recognizers