Efficient Recurrent Residual Networks Improved by Feature Transfer

Abstract

Over the past several years, deep and wide neural networks have achieved great success in many tasks. However, in real life applications, because the gains usually come at a cost in terms of the system resources (e.g., memory, computation and power consumption), it is impractical to run top-performing but heavy networks such as VGGNet and GoogleNet directly on mobile and embedded devices, like smartphones and cameras. To tackle this problem, we propose the use of recurrent layers in residual networks to reduce the redundant information and save the parameters. Furthermore, with the help of feature map knowledge transfer, the performance of Recurrent Residual Networks (ReResNet) can be improved so as to reach similar accuracy to some complex state-of-the-art architectures on CIFAR-10, even with much fewer parameters. In this paper, we demonstrate the efficiency of ReResNet possibly improved by Feature Transfer on three datasets, CIFAR-10, Scenes and MiniPlaces.