XnODR and XnIDR: Two Accurate and Fast Fully Connected Layers For Convolutional Neural Networks

Although Capsule Network is powerful at defining the positional relationship between features in deep neural networks for visual recognition tasks, it is computationally expensive and not suitable for running on mobile devices. The bottleneck is in the computational complexity of the Dynamic Routing mechanism used between the capsules. On the other hand, XNOR-Net is fast and computationally efficient, though it suffers from low accuracy due to information loss in the binarization process. To address the computational burdens of the Dynamic Routing mechanism, this paper proposes new Fully Connected (FC) layers by xnorizing the linear projector outside or inside the Dynamic Routing within the CapsFC layer. Specifically, our proposed FC layers have two versions, XnODR (Xnorize the Linear Projection Linear Projector Outside Dynamic Routing) and XnIDR (Xnorize the Linear Projection Linear Projector Inside Dynamic Routing). To test the generalization of both XnODR and XnIDR, we insert them into two different networks, MobileNet V2 and ResNet-50. Our experiments on three datasets, MNIST, CIFAR-10, and MultiMNIST validate their effectiveness. The results demonstrate that both XnODR and XnIDR help networks to have high accuracy with lower FLOPs and fewer parameters (e.g., 95.32\% correctness with 2.99M parameters and 312.04M FLOPs on CIFAR-10).Comment: 17 pages, 9 figures, 10 table