Title: SEP-Nets: Small and Effective Pattern Networks,
Abstract: While going deeper has been witnessed to improve the performance of
convolutional neural networks (CNN), going smaller for CNN has received
increasing attention recently due to its attractiveness for mobile/embedded
applications. It remains an active and important topic how to design a small
network while retaining the performance of large and deep CNNs (e.g., Inception
Nets, ResNets). Albeit there are already intensive studies on compressing the
size of CNNs, the considerable drop of performance is still a key concern in
many designs. This paper addresses this concern with several new contributions.
First, we propose a simple yet powerful method for compressing the size of deep
CNNs based on parameter binarization. The striking difference from most
previous work on parameter binarization/quantization lies at different
treatments of $1\times 1$ convolutions and $k\times k$ convolutions ($k>1$),
where we only binarize $k\times k$ convolutions into binary patterns. The
resulting networks are referred to as pattern networks. By doing this, we show
that previous deep CNNs such as GoogLeNet and Inception-type Nets can be
compressed dramatically with marginal drop in performance. Second, in light of
the different functionalities of $1\times 1$ (data projection/transformation)
and $k\times k$ convolutions (pattern extraction), we propose a new block
structure codenamed the pattern residual block that adds transformed feature
maps generated by $1\times 1$ convolutions to the pattern feature maps
generated by $k\times k$ convolutions, based on which we design a small network
with $\sim 1$ million parameters. Combining with our parameter binarization, we
achieve better performance on ImageNet than using similar sized networks
including recently released Google MobileNets.