Deep Spline Neural Networks
M. Unser, P. Bohra, J. Campos, H. Gupta, S. Aziznejad
Online Seminars on Numerical Approximation and Applications (OSNA2'20), Passau, Federal Republic of Germany, Virtual, November 9-December 3, 2020.
We present a unifying functional framework for the implementation and training of deep neural networks (DNN) with free-form activation functions. To make the problem well posed, we constrain the shape of the trainable activations (neurons) by penalizing their second-order total-variations. We prove that the optimal activations are adaptive piecewise-linear splines, which allows us to recast the problem as a parametric optimization. We then specify some corresponding trainable B-spline-based activation units. These modules can be inserted in deep neural architectures and optimized efficiently using standard tools. We provide experimental results that demonstrate the benefit of our approach.
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