Generalized multi-object classification and tracking with sparse feature resonator networks

Despite the successes of deep learning in computer vision, difficulties persist in recognizing objects that have undergone group-symmetric transformations rarely seen during training$\unicode{x2013}$for example objects seen in unusual poses, scales, positions, or combinations thereof. Equivariant neural networks are a solution to the problem of generalizing across symmetric transformations, but require knowledge of transformations a priori. An alternative family of architectures proposes to learn equivariant operators in a latent space, from examples of symmetric transformations. Here, using simple datasets of rotated and translated noisy MNIST, we illustrate how such architectures can successfully be harnessed for out-of-distribution classification, thus overcoming the limitations of both traditional and equivariant networks. While conceptually enticing, we discuss challenges ahead on the path of scaling these architectures to more complex datasets. Our code is available at https://github.com/BRAIN-Aalto/equivariant_operator.

Generalisation across image scales remains a fundamental challenge for deep networks, which often fail to handle images at scales not seen during training (the out-of-distribution problem). In this paper, we present provably scale-invariant Gaussian derivative residual networks (GaussDerResNets), constructed out of scale-covariant Gaussian derivative residual blocks coupled in cascade, aimed at addressing this problem. By adding residual skip connections to the previous notion of Gaussian derivative layers, deeper networks with substantially increased accuracy can be constructed, while preserving very good scale generalisation properties. Explicit proofs are provided for the underlying scale-covariant and scale-invariant properties in arbitrary dimensions. To analyse the ability of GaussDerResNets to generalise to new scales, we apply them on a new rescaled version of the STL-10 dataset, where training is done at a single fixed scale and evaluation is performed on copies of the test set, each rescaled to a distinct spatial scale, with scale factors extending over a range of 4. We also conduct similar systematic experiments on the rescaled versions of Fashion-MNIST and CIFAR-10 datasets, and the existing STIR datasets. Experimentally, we demonstrate that the GaussDerResNets have strong scale generalisation and scale selection properties on all the four considered datasets with scaling variations. In our ablation studies, we investigate different architectural variants of GaussDerResNets, demonstrating that basing the architecture on depthwise-separable convolutions reduces the number of parameters and computations, with reasonably maintained accuracy and scale generalisation. We conclude by outlining how the proposed GaussDerResNets can be extended to joint local spatial and scale selection, to address the topic of multi-object detection in a provably scale-invariant manner.

Learning symmetries through data augmentation offers an alternative to architectural equivariance, but does not guarantee that a network respects those symmetries. Measuring learned equivariance is especially difficult for intermediate representations, whose group actions are not specified. In a finite discrete setting, we show that equivariance requires representations of original and transformed inputs to determine one another exactly, yielding a test based on normalized mutual information (NMI). For high-dimensional activations, we use centered kernel alignment (CKA) as a scalable test, with an exact guarantee for orthogonal feature transformations. Across architectures and tasks, augmentation usually increases transformation consistency, showing that learned equivariance can be probed directly from representations without recovering the hidden transformation rules that relate them.