Dual Intercommunication Network: Enabling Interhemispheric Communications in Hemisphere-Inspired ANNs

Abstract

The human brain has been a main source of inspiration for designing deep learning models. Recently, inspired by the specialized functions of two cerebral hemispheres in processing low and high spatial frequency information, some dual-path neural networks with global and local branches have been proposed to deal with both coarse- and fine-grained visual tasks simultaneously. However, in existing works, the interhemispheric communication mechanism, which is responded by the corpus callosum, the largest white matter structure in the human brain that connecting the left and right cerebral hemispheres, is still not fully explored and exploited. This paper aims to explore how the corpus callosum can inspire us to enable transfer and integration of information between global and local branches in hemisphere-inspired artificial neural networks, such that one branch can leverage the other's learned knowledge and benefit each other. To this end, we propose a gated intercommunication unit to selectively transfer useful knowledge between the two branches via attention mechanisms to alleviate the negative transfer. Experiments on sb-MNIST and two pedestrian attribute datasets show that the proposed method outperforms the compared ones in most cases.