Deep Roots: Improving CNN Efficiency with Hierarchical Filter Groups

We propose a new method for training computationally efficient and compact convolutional neural networks (CNNs) using a novel sparse connection structure that resembles a tree root. Our sparse connection structure facilitates a significant reduction in computational cost and number of parameters of state-of-the-art deep CNNs without compromising accuracy. We validate our approach by using it to train more efficient variants of state-of-the-art CNN architectures, evaluated on the CIFAR10 and ILSVRC datasets. Our results show similar or higher accuracy than the baseline architectures with much less compute, as measured by CPU and GPU timings. For example, for ResNet 50, our model has 40% fewer parameters, 45% fewer floating point operations, and is 31% (12%) faster on a CPU (GPU). For the deeper ResNet 200 our model has 25% fewer floating point operations and 44% fewer parameters, while maintaining state-of-the-art accuracy. For GoogLeNet, our model has 7% fewer parameters and is 21% (16%) faster on a CPU (GPU).