Taylor Convolutional Networks for Image Classification

This paper provides a new perspective to understand CNNs based on the Taylor expansion, leading to new Taylor Convolutional Networks (TaylorNets) for image classification. We introduce a principled combination of the high frequency information (i.e., detailed information) and low frequency information in the end-to-end TaylorNets, based on a nonlinear combination of the convolutional feature maps. The steerable module developed in TaylorNets is generic, which can be easily integrated into well-known deep architectures and learned within the same pipeline of the back propagation algorithm, yielding a higher representation capacity for CNNs. Extensive experimental results demonstrate the super capability of our TaylorNets which improve widely used CNNs architectures, such as conventional CNNs and ResNet, in terms of object classification accuracy on well-known benchmarks. The code will be publicly available.