Group Feedback Capsule Network

Xinpeng Ding, Nannan Wang, Xinbo Gao, Jie Li, Xiaoyu Wang, Tongliang Liu

Abstract: In capsule networks (CapsNets), the capsule is made up of collections of neurons. Their adjacent capsule layers are connected using routing-by-agreement mechanisms in an unsupervised way. The routing-by-agreement mechanisms have two main drawbacks: a) too many parameters and high computation complexity; b) the cluster distribution assumptions of these routing mechanisms may not hold in some complex real-world data. In this paper, we propose a novel Group Feedback Capsule Network (GF-CapsNet) which adopts a supervised routing strategy called group-routing. Compared with the previous routing strategies which globally transform each capsule, Group-routing equally splits capsules into groups where capsules locally share the same transformation weights, reducing routing parameters. To address the second drawback, we devise a distance network to directly predict capsules in a supervised way without making distribution assumptions. Our proposed group-routing captures local information of low-level capsules by group-wise transformation and supervisedly predicts high-level ones in a feedback way to address two drawbacks respectively. We conduct experiments on CIFAR-10/100 and SVHN datasets and the results show that our method can perform better against state-of-the-arts.