Microsoft Wins ImageNet 2015 through Highway Net (or Feedforward LSTM) without Gates
Jürgen Schmidhuber
Microsoft Research dominated the ImageNet 2015 contest with a very deep neural network of 150 layers [1]. Congrats to Kaiming He & Xiangyu Zhang & Shaoqing Ren & Jian Sun on the great results [2]!
Their Residual Net or ResNet [1] of December 2015 is a special case of our Highway Net [4] of May 2015, the first very deep feedforward networks with hundreds of layers. Highway nets are essentially feedforward versions of recurrent Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) networks [3] with forget gates (or gated recurrent units) [5].
Let g, t, h denote non-linear differentiable functions. Each non-input layer of a Highway Net computes
g(x)x + t(x)h(x),
where x is the data from the previous layer. (Like LSTM [3] with forget gates [5] for recurrent networks.)
The CNN layers of ResNets [1] do the same with g(x)=1 (a typical Highway Net initialisation) and t(x)=1,
essentially like a Highway Net or a feedforward
LSTM [3] without gates.
This is the basic ingredient required to overcome the fundamental deep learning problem of vanishing or exploding gradients.
The authors mention it [1], but do not mention my very first student Sepp Hochreiter (now professor) who identified and analyzed it in 1991, years before anybody else did [6].
Apart from the quibbles above, I liked the paper [1] a lot. LSTM concepts keep invading CNN territory [e.g., 7a-e], also through GPU-friendly multi-dimensional LSTMs [8].
References
[1] Kaiming He, Xiangyu Zhang, Shaoqing Ren, Jian Sun. Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition. TR
arxiv:1512.03385, Dec 2015.
[2]
ImageNet Large Scale Visual Recognition Challenge 2015 (ILSVRC2015):
Results
[3] S. Hochreiter, J. Schmidhuber. Long Short-Term Memory. Neural Computation, 9(8):1735-1780, 1997. Based on TR FKI-207-95, TUM (1995). PDF. Led to a lot of follow-up work, and is now heavily
used by leading IT companies all over the world.
[4] R. K. Srivastava, K. Greff, J. Schmidhuber. Highway networks. TR
arxiv:1505.00387 (May 2015)
and
arXiv:1507.06228 (July 2015).
Also at NIPS'2015.
[5] F. A. Gers, J. Schmidhuber, F. Cummins. Learning to Forget: Continual Prediction with LSTM. Neural Computation, 12(10):2451-2471, 2000.
PDF.
[6] S. Hochreiter. Untersuchungen zu dynamischen neuronalen Netzen. Diploma thesis, TU Munich, 1991. Advisor: J. Schmidhuber. Overview.
[7a] 2011: First superhuman CNNs
[7b] 2011: First human-competitive CNNs for handwriting
[7c] 2012: First CNN to win segmentation contest
[7d] 2012: First CNN to win contest on object discovery in large images
[7e] Deep Learning.
Scholarpedia, 10(11):32832, 2015
[8] M. Stollenga, W. Byeon, M. Liwicki, J. Schmidhuber. Parallel Multi-Dimensional LSTM, with Application to Fast Biomedical Volumetric Image Segmentation. NIPS 2015;
arxiv:1506.07452.
Can you spot the Fibonacci pattern in the graphics above?
.
|