Rotation Equivariant Vector Field Networks
We propose a method to encode rotation equivariance or invariance into convolutional neural networks (CNNs). Each convolutional filter is applied with several orientations and returns a vector field that represents the magnitude and angle of the highest scoring rotation at the given spatial location. To propagate information about the main orientation of the different features to each layer in the network, we propose an enriched orientation pooling, i.e. max and argmax operators over the orientation space, allowing to keep the dimensionality of the feature maps low and to propagate only useful information. We name this approach RotEqNet. We apply RotEqNet to three datasets: first, a rotation invariant classification problem, the MNIST-rot benchmark, in which we improve over the state-of-the-art results. Then, a neuron membrane segmentation benchmark, where we show that RotEqNet can be applied successfully to obtain equivariance to rotation with a simple fully convolutional architecture. Finally, we improve significantly the state-of-the-art on the problem of estimating cars’ absolute orientation in aerial images, a problem where the output is required to be covariant with respect to the object’s orientation. …

Kernel Graph Convolutional Neural Network
Graph kernels have been successfully applied to many graph classification problems. Typically, a kernel is first designed, and then an SVM classifier is trained based on the features defined implicitly by this kernel. This two-stage approach decouples data representation from learning, which is suboptimal. On the other hand, Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) have the capability to learn their own features directly from the raw data during training. Unfortunately, they cannot handle irregular data such as graphs. We address this challenge by using graph kernels to embed meaningful local neighborhoods of the graphs in a continuous vector space. A set of filters is then convolved with these patches, pooled, and the output is then passed to a feedforward network. With limited parameter tuning, our approach outperforms strong baselines on 7 out of 10 benchmark datasets. …

Graph Optimized Convolutional Network (GOCN)
Graph Convolutional Networks (GCNs) have been widely studied for graph data representation and learning tasks. Existing GCNs generally use a fixed single graph which may lead to weak suboptimal for data representation/learning and are also hard to deal with multiple graphs. To address these issues, we propose a novel Graph Optimized Convolutional Network (GOCN) for graph data representation and learning. Our GOCN is motivated based on our re-interpretation of graph convolution from a regularization/optimization framework. The core idea of GOCN is to formulate graph optimization and graph convolutional representation into a unified framework and thus conducts both of them cooperatively to boost their respective performance in GCN learning scheme. Moreover, based on the proposed unified graph optimization-convolution framework, we propose a novel Multiple Graph Optimized Convolutional Network (M-GOCN) to naturally address the data with multiple graphs. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness and benefit of the proposed GOCN and M-GOCN. …

RONA
The soaring demand for intelligent mobile applications calls for deploying powerful deep neural networks (DNNs) on mobile devices. However, the outstanding performance of DNNs notoriously relies on increasingly complex models, which in turn is associated with an increase in computational expense far surpassing mobile devices’ capacity. What is worse, app service providers need to collect and utilize a large volume of users’ data, which contain sensitive information, to build the sophisticated DNN models. Directly deploying these models on public mobile devices presents prohibitive privacy risk. To benefit from the on-device deep learning without the capacity and privacy concerns, we design a private model compression framework RONA. Following the knowledge distillation paradigm, we jointly use hint learning, distillation learning, and self learning to train a compact and fast neural network. The knowledge distilled from the cumbersome model is adaptively bounded and carefully perturbed to enforce differential privacy. We further propose an elegant query sample selection method to reduce the number of queries and control the privacy loss. A series of empirical evaluations as well as the implementation on an Android mobile device show that RONA can not only compress cumbersome models efficiently but also provide a strong privacy guarantee. For example, on SVHN, when a meaningful $(9.83,10^{-6})$-differential privacy is guaranteed, the compact model trained by RONA can obtain 20$\times$ compression ratio and 19$\times$ speed-up with merely 0.97% accuracy loss. …