Johnny Joyce

Johnny Joyce, Jan Verschelde

Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) are a popular choice of model for tasks in computer vision. When CNNs are made with many layers, resulting in a deep neural network, skip connections may be added to create an easier gradient optimization problem while retaining model expressiveness. In this paper, we show that arbitrarily complex, trained, linear CNNs with skip connections can be simplified into a single-layer model, resulting in greatly reduced computational requirements during prediction time. We also present a method for training nonlinear models with skip connections that are gradually removed throughout training, giving the benefits of skip connections without requiring computational overhead during during prediction time. These results are demonstrated with practical examples on Residual Networks (ResNet) architecture.

Johnny Joyce, Jan Verschelde

Neural networks are important tools in machine learning. Representing piecewise linear activation functions with tropical arithmetic enables the application of tropical geometry. Algorithms are presented to compute regions where the neural networks are linear maps. Through computational experiments, we provide insights on the difficulty to train neural networks, in particular on the problems of overfitting and on the benefits of skip connections.