VNODE: A Piecewise Continuous Volterra Neural Network

Abstract: This paper introduces Volterra Neural Ordinary Differential Equations (VNODE), a piecewise continuous Volterra Neural Network that integrates nonlinear Volterra filtering with continuous time neural ordinary differential equations for image classification. Drawing inspiration from the visual cortex, where discrete event processing is interleaved with continuous integration, VNODE alternates between discrete Volterra feature extraction and ODE driven state evolution. This hybrid formulation captures complex patterns while requiring substantially fewer parameters than conventional deep architectures. VNODE consistently outperforms state of the art models with improved computational complexity as exemplified on benchmark datasets like CIFAR10 and Imagenet1K.