Mohammed Amer

Mohammed Amer, Tomás Maul, Iman Yi Liao

The growing capacity of neural networks has strongly contributed to their success at complex machine learning tasks and the computational demand of such large models has, in turn, stimulated a significant improvement in the hardware necessary to accelerate their computations. However, models with high latency aren't suitable for limited-resource environments such as hand-held and IoT devices. Hence, many deep learning techniques aim to address this problem by developing models with reasonable accuracy without violating the limited-resource constraint. In this work, we use a one-shot neural architecture search model to implicitly evaluate the performance of an intractable number of multipath neural networks. Combining this architecture search with a pruning technique and architecture sample evaluation, we can model the relation between the accuracy and the latency of a spectrum of models with graded complexity. We show that our method can accurately model the relative performance between models with different latencies and predict the performance of unseen models with good precision across different datasets.

Mohammed Amer, Tomás Maul

Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) are known for their good performance and generalization in vision-related tasks and have become state-of-the-art in both application and research-based domains. However, just like other neural network models, they suffer from a susceptibility to noise and adversarial attacks. An adversarial defence aims at reducing a neural network's susceptibility to adversarial attacks through learning or architectural modifications. We propose the weight map layer (WM) as a generic architectural addition to CNNs and show that it can increase their robustness to noise and adversarial attacks. We further explain that the enhanced robustness of the two WM variants results from the adaptive activation-variance amplification exhibited by the layer. We show that the WM layer can be integrated into scaled up models to increase their noise and adversarial attack robustness, while achieving comparable accuracy levels across different datasets.

Mohammed Amer, Tomás Maul

Capsule network (CapsNet) was introduced as an enhancement over convolutional neural networks, supplementing the latter's invariance properties with equivariance through pose estimation. CapsNet achieved a very decent performance with a shallow architecture and a significant reduction in parameters count. However, the width of the first layer in CapsNet is still contributing to a significant number of its parameters and the shallowness may be limiting the representational power of the capsules. To address these limitations, we introduce Path Capsule Network (PathCapsNet), a deep parallel multi-path version of CapsNet. We show that a judicious coordination of depth, max-pooling, regularization by DropCircuit and a new fan-in routing by agreement technique can achieve better or comparable results to CapsNet, while further reducing the parameter count significantly.