Improving deep convolutional neural networks with mixed maxout units

PLoS One. 2017 Jul 20;12(7):e0180049. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0180049. eCollection 2017.

Abstract

Motivated by insights from the maxout-units-based deep Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) that "non-maximal features are unable to deliver" and "feature mapping subspace pooling is insufficient," we present a novel mixed variant of the recently introduced maxout unit called a mixout unit. Specifically, we do so by calculating the exponential probabilities of feature mappings gained by applying different convolutional transformations over the same input and then calculating the expected values according to their exponential probabilities. Moreover, we introduce the Bernoulli distribution to balance the maximum values with the expected values of the feature mappings subspace. Finally, we design a simple model to verify the pooling ability of mixout units and a Mixout-units-based Network-in-Network (NiN) model to analyze the feature learning ability of the mixout models. We argue that our proposed units improve the pooling ability and that mixout models can achieve better feature learning and classification performance.

MeSH terms

  • Algorithms
  • Machine Learning*
  • Neural Networks, Computer*

Grants and funding

This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (61601499). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.