DelugeNets: Deep Networks with Efficient and Flexible Cross-layer Information Inflows

Deluge Networks (DelugeNets) are deep neural networks which efficiently facilitate massive cross-layer information inflows from preceding layers to succeeding layers. The connections between layers in DelugeNets are established through cross-layer depthwise convolutional layers with learnable filters, acting as a flexible yet efficient selection mechanism. DelugeNets can propagate information across many layers with greater flexibility and utilize network parameters more effectively compared to ResNets, whilst being more efficient than DenseNets. Remarkably, a DelugeNet model with just model complexity of 4.31 GigaFLOPs and 20.2M network parameters, achieve classification errors of 3.76% and 19.02% on CIFAR-10 and CIFAR-100 dataset respectively. Moreover, DelugeNet-122 performs competitively to ResNet-200 on ImageNet dataset, despite costing merely half of the computations needed by the latter.