Deep Quaternion Networks
This work addresses the need for more efficient deep learning models for researchers and practitioners, though it is incremental as it extends from complex to quaternion numbers.
The paper tackles the problem of deep learning being limited to real-valued numbers by exploring quaternion networks, showing improved convergence on CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, and KITTI Road Segmentation datasets with fewer parameters.
The field of deep learning has seen significant advancement in recent years. However, much of the existing work has been focused on real-valued numbers. Recent work has shown that a deep learning system using the complex numbers can be deeper for a fixed parameter budget compared to its real-valued counterpart. In this work, we explore the benefits of generalizing one step further into the hyper-complex numbers, quaternions specifically, and provide the architecture components needed to build deep quaternion networks. We develop the theoretical basis by reviewing quaternion convolutions, developing a novel quaternion weight initialization scheme, and developing novel algorithms for quaternion batch-normalization. These pieces are tested in a classification model by end-to-end training on the CIFAR-10 and CIFAR-100 data sets and a segmentation model by end-to-end training on the KITTI Road Segmentation data set. These quaternion networks show improved convergence compared to real-valued and complex-valued networks, especially on the segmentation task, while having fewer parameters