Papers › An Enhanced Scheme for Reducing the Complexity of Pointwise Convolutions in CNNs for...

An Enhanced Scheme for Reducing the Complexity of Pointwise Convolutions in CNNs for Image Classification Based on Interleaved Grouped Filters without Divisibility Constraints

8 Sep 2022Entropy 2022 9archive 2025-07-28

Joao Paulo Schwarz Schuler, Santiago Romani, Mohamed Abdel-Nasser, Hatem Rashwan, Domenec Puig

In image classification with Deep Convolutional Neural Networks (DCNNs), the number of parameters in pointwise convolutions rapidly grows due to the multiplication of the number of filters by the number of input channels that come from the previous layer. Existing studies demonstrated that a subnetwork can replace pointwise convolutional layers with significantly fewer parameters and fewer floating-point computations, while maintaining the learning capacity. In this paper, we propose an improved scheme for reducing the complexity of pointwise convolutions in DCNNs for image classification based on interleaved grouped filters without divisibility constraints. The proposed scheme utilizes grouped pointwise convolutions, in which each group processes a fraction of the input channels. It requires a number of channels per group as a hyperparameter Ch. The subnetwork of the proposed scheme contains two consecutive convolutional layers K and L, connected by an interleaving layer in the middle, and summed at the end. The number of groups of filters and filters per group for layers K and L is determined by exact divisions of the original number of input channels and filters by Ch. If the divisions were not exact, the original layer could not be substituted. In this paper, we refine the previous algorithm so that input channels are replicated and groups can have different numbers of filters to cope with non exact divisibility situations. Thus, the proposed scheme further reduces the number of floating-point computations (11%) and trainable parameters (10%) achieved by the previous method. We tested our optimization on an EfficientNet-B0 as a baseline architecture and made classification tests on the CIFAR-10, Colorectal Cancer Histology, and Malaria datasets. For each dataset, our optimization achieves a saving of 76%, 89%, and 91% of the number of trainable parameters of EfficientNet-B0, while keeping its test classification accuracy.

PaperPDFCode

Code

Repository list and official/mentioned flags are the archive's, frozen 2025-07-28. Reachability, where shown, is from one Syntology probe window (2026-09-16 to 2026-09-18); repositories not probed show nothing. GitHub stars are not tracked.

Code Syntology ran Syntology

Not run by Syntology. Nothing on this page verifies that the listed code works.

Tasks

Image Classificationimage-classification

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

TaskDatasetModelMetricValueRank at snapshotLeaderboardReport
Image Classification CIFAR-10 kEffNet-B0 V2 32ch + H Flip Percentage correct 94.95 #146 of 265 Archive leaderboard report
Image Classification Malaria Dataset kEffNet-B0 V2 16ch Acc. (test) 97.61% #1 of 3 Archive leaderboard report
Image Classification Malaria Dataset kEffNet-B0 V2 16ch PARAMS 0.61M #1 of 3 Archive leaderboard report
Image Classification Malaria Dataset kEffNet-B0 V2 2ch Acc. (test) 96.70% #3 of 3 Archive leaderboard report
Image Classification Malaria Dataset kEffNet-B0 V2 2ch PARAMS 0.3M #3 of 3 Archive leaderboard report

Ranks are positions in the archive's leaderboards as they stood at the 2025-07-28 snapshot. Results published since then are not among these rows, so a rank here is not a current standing.

Methods

1x1 ConvolutionAverage PoolingBatch NormalizationConvolutionDCNNDense ConnectionsDepthwise ConvolutionDepthwise Separable ConvolutionDropoutEfficientNetGrouped ConvolutionInverted Residual BlockNONPointwise ConvolutionRMSPropReLUSigmoid ActivationSoftmaxSqueeze-and-Excitation BlockTest

Report a problem or propose a change · a person checks every report against the paper or source before anything changes; decisions are listed on /corrections