Cross-channel Communication Networks
Authors
Authors
- Jianwei Yang
- Zhile Ren
- Chuang Gan
- Hongyuan Zhu
- Ji Lin
- Devi Parikh
Authors
- Jianwei Yang
- Zhile Ren
- Chuang Gan
- Hongyuan Zhu
- Ji Lin
- Devi Parikh
Published on
11/06/2019
Categories
Convolutional neural networks process input data by sending channel-wise feature response maps to subsequent layers. While a lot of progress has been made by making networks deeper, information from each channel can only be propagated from lower levels to higher levels in a hierarchical feed-forward manner. When viewing each filter in the convolutional layer as a neuron, those neurons are not communicating explicitly within each layer in CNNs. We introduce a novel network unit called Cross-channel Communication (C3) block, a simple yet effective module to encourage the neuron communication within the same layer. The C3 block enables neurons to exchange information through a micro neural network, which consists of a feature encoder, a message passer, and a feature decoder, before sending the information to the next layer. With C3 block, each neuron accounts for the channel-wise responses from other neurons at the same layer and learns more discriminative and complementary representations. Extensive experiments for multiple computer vision tasks show that our proposed mechanism allows shallower networks to aggregate useful information within each layer, and outperform baseline deep networks and other competitive methods.
This work was published in NeurIPS 2019.
Please cite our work using the BibTeX below.
@incollection{NIPS2019_8411,
title = {Cross-channel Communication Networks},
author = {Yang, Jianwei and Ren, Zhile and Gan, Chuang and Zhu, Hongyuan and Parikh, Devi},
booktitle = {Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 32},
editor = {H. Wallach and H. Larochelle and A. Beygelzimer and F. d\textquotesingle Alch\'{e}-Buc and E. Fox and R. Garnett},
pages = {1297--1306},
year = {2019},
publisher = {Curran Associates, Inc.},
url = {http://papers.nips.cc/paper/8411-cross-channel-communication-networks.pdf}
}