Log-DenseNet: How to Sparsify a DenseNet

Hanzhang Hu, Debadeepta Dey, Allie Del Giorno, Martial Hebert, J. Andrew Bagnell

Abstract:

Skip connections are increasingly utilized by deep neural networks to improve accuracy and cost-efficiency. In particular, the recent DenseNet is efficient in computation and parameters, and achieves state-of-the-art predictions by directly connecting each feature layer to all previous ones. However, DenseNet's extreme connectivity pattern may hinder its scalability to high depths, and in applications like fully convolutional networks, full DenseNet connections are prohibitively expensive.
This work first experimentally shows that one key advantage of skip connections is to have short distances among feature layers during backpropagation. Specifically, using a fixed number of skip connections, the connection patterns with shorter backpropagation distance among layers have more accurate predictions. Following this insight, we propose a connection template, Log-DenseNet, which, in comparison to DenseNet, only slightly increases the backpropagation distances among layers from 1 to ($1 + \log_2 L$), but uses only $L\log_2 L$ total connections instead of $O(L^2)$. Hence, \logdenses are easier to scale than DenseNets, and no longer require careful GPU memory management. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our design principle by showing better performance than DenseNets on tabula rasa semantic segmentation, and competitive results on visual recognition.

TL;DR: We show shortcut connections should be placed in patterns that minimize between-layer distances during backpropagation, and design networks that achieve log L distances using L log(L) connections.

Keywords: DenseNet, sparse shortcut connections, network architecture, scene parsing, image classification

Data: [CIFAR-10](https://paperswithcode.com/dataset/cifar-10), [CIFAR-100](https://paperswithcode.com/dataset/cifar-100), [CamVid](https://paperswithcode.com/dataset/camvid), [SVHN](https://paperswithcode.com/dataset/svhn)

Community Implementations: [ 3 code implementations](https://www.catalyzex.com/paper/arxiv:1711.00002/code)