Efficient Fusion of Sparse and Complementary Convolutions
This addresses the need for efficient CNNs in vision tasks, though it is incremental as it builds on existing sparse convolution methods.
The paper tackles the problem of creating compact convolutional neural networks by using hand-crafted sparse kernels, achieving a 2-4x reduction in parameters and computation for classification and localization, and a 12.4x smaller, 3x faster detector for object detection.
We propose a new method to create compact convolutional neural networks (CNNs) by exploiting sparse convolutions. Different from previous works that learn sparsity in models, we directly employ hand-crafted kernels with regular sparse patterns, which result in the computational gain in practice without sophisticated and dedicated software or hardware. The core of our approach is an efficient network module that linearly combines sparse kernels to yield feature representations as strong as those from regular kernels. We integrate this module into various network architectures and demonstrate its effectiveness on three vision tasks, object classification, localization and detection. For object classification and localization, our approach achieves comparable or better performance than several baselines and related works while providing lower computational costs with fewer parameters (on average, a $2-4\times$ reduction of convolutional parameters and computation). For object detection, our approach leads to a VGG-16-based Faster RCNN detector that is 12.4$\times$ smaller and about 3$\times$ faster than the baseline.