Mixed link networks

Abstract

On the basis of the analysis by revealing the equivalence of modern networks, we find that both ResNet and DenseNet are essentially derived from the same “dense topology”, yet they only differ in the form of connection - addition (dubbed “inner link”) vs. concatenation (dubbed “outer link”). However, both forms of connections have the superiority and insufficiency. To combine their advantages and avoid certain limitations on representation learning, we present a highly efficient and modularized Mixed Link Network (MixNet) which is equipped with flexible inner link and outer link modules. Consequently, ResNet, DenseNet and Dual Path Network (DPN) can be regarded as a special case of MixNet, respectively. Furthermore, we demonstrate that MixNets can achieve superior efficiency in parameter over the state-of-the-art architectures on many competitive datasets like CIFAR-10/100, SVHN and ImageNet.