Papers › Self-grouping Convolutional Neural Networks

Self-grouping Convolutional Neural Networks

29 Sep 2020arXiv:2009.13803archive 2025-07-28

Qingbei Guo, Xiao-Jun Wu, Josef Kittler, Zhiquan Feng

Although group convolution operators are increasingly used in deep convolutional neural networks to improve the computational efficiency and to reduce the number of parameters, most existing methods construct their group convolution architectures by a predefined partitioning of the filters of each convolutional layer into multiple regular filter groups with an equal spatial group size and data-independence, which prevents a full exploitation of their potential. To tackle this issue, we propose a novel method of designing self-grouping convolutional neural networks, called SG-CNN, in which the filters of each convolutional layer group themselves based on the similarity of their importance vectors. Concretely, for each filter, we first evaluate the importance value of their input channels to identify the importance vectors, and then group these vectors by clustering. Using the resulting \emph{data-dependent} centroids, we prune the less important connections, which implicitly minimizes the accuracy loss of the pruning, thus yielding a set of \emph{diverse} group convolution filters. Subsequently, we develop two fine-tuning schemes, i.e. (1) both local and global fine-tuning and (2) global only fine-tuning, which experimentally deliver comparable results, to recover the recognition capacity of the pruned network. Comprehensive experiments carried out on the CIFAR-10/100 and ImageNet datasets demonstrate that our self-grouping convolution method adapts to various state-of-the-art CNN architectures, such as ResNet and DenseNet, and delivers superior performance in terms of compression ratio, speedup and recognition accuracy. We demonstrate the ability of SG-CNN to generalise by transfer learning, including domain adaption and object detection, showing competitive results. Our source code is available at https://github.com/QingbeiGuo/SG-CNN.git.

PaperPDFCode

Code

QingbeiGuo/SG-CNN officialmentioned in paperpytorch report

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

ClusteringComputational EfficiencyDomain AdaptationObject DetectionTransfer Learningobject-detection

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

No leaderboard rows for this paper in the archive.

Methods

1x1 ConvolutionAverage PoolingBatch NormalizationBottleneck Residual BlockConcatenated Skip ConnectionConvolutionDense BlockDense ConnectionsDropoutGlobal Average PoolingKaiming InitializationMax PoolingReLUResidual BlockResidual ConnectionSoftmax

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