Decoupled Dynamic Filter Networks

Abstract: Convolution is one of the basic building blocks of CNN architectures. Despite its common use, standard convolution has two main shortcomings: Content-agnostic and Computation-heavy. Dynamic filters are content-adaptive, while further increasing the computational overhead. Depth-wise convolution is a lightweight variant, but it usually leads to a drop in CNN performance or requires a larger number of channels. In this work, we propose the Decoupled Dynamic Filter (DDF) that can simultaneously tackle both of these shortcomings. Inspired by recent advances in attention, DDF decouples a depth-wise dynamic filter into spatial and channel dynamic filters. This decomposition considerably reduces the number of parameters and limits computational costs to the same level as depth-wise convolution. Meanwhile, we observe a significant boost in performance when replacing standard convolution with DDF in classification networks. ResNet50 / 101 get improved by 1.9% and 1.3% on the top-1 accuracy, while their computational costs are reduced by nearly half. Experiments on the detection and joint upsampling networks also demonstrate the superior performance of the DDF upsampling variant (DDF-Up) in comparison with standard convolution and specialized content-adaptive layers.