Learnable Heterogeneous Convolution: Learning both topology and strength.
Journal:
Neural networks : the official journal of the International Neural Network Society
Published Date:
Apr 20, 2021
Abstract
Existing convolution techniques in artificial neural networks suffer from huge computation complexity, while the biological neural network works in a much more powerful yet efficient way. Inspired by the biological plasticity of dendritic topology and synaptic strength, our method, Learnable Heterogeneous Convolution, realizes joint learning of kernel shape and weights, which unifies existing handcrafted convolution techniques in a data-driven way. A model based on our method can converge with structural sparse weights and then be accelerated by devices of high parallelism. In the experiments, our method either reduces VGG16/19 and ResNet34/50 computation by nearly 5× on CIFAR10 and 2× on ImageNet without harming the performance, where the weights are compressed by 10× and 4× respectively; or improves the accuracy by up to 1.0% on CIFAR10 and 0.5% on ImageNet with slightly higher efficiency. The code will be available on www.github.com/Genera1Z/LearnableHeterogeneousConvolution.