English

SparseMask: Differentiable Connectivity Learning for Dense Image Prediction

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition 2019-08-06 v2

Abstract

In this paper, we aim at automatically searching an efficient network architecture for dense image prediction. Particularly, we follow the encoder-decoder style and focus on designing a connectivity structure for the decoder. To achieve that, we design a densely connected network with learnable connections, named Fully Dense Network, which contains a large set of possible final connectivity structures. We then employ gradient descent to search the optimal connectivity from the dense connections. The search process is guided by a novel loss function, which pushes the weight of each connection to be binary and the connections to be sparse. The discovered connectivity achieves competitive results on two segmentation datasets, while runs more than three times faster and requires less than half parameters compared to the state-of-the-art methods. An extensive experiment shows that the discovered connectivity is compatible with various backbones and generalizes well to other dense image prediction tasks.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1904.07642,
  title  = {SparseMask: Differentiable Connectivity Learning for Dense Image Prediction},
  author = {Huikai Wu and Junge Zhang and Kaiqi Huang},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1904.07642},
  year   = {2019}
}

Comments

Accepted by ICCV 2019. Code is available at https://github.com/wuhuikai/SparseMask

R2 v1 2026-06-23T08:41:14.593Z