2017/11/08 by Weiyang Liu, Yan‐Ming Zhang, Liu, Weiyang +11 · 4 citations
Computer Science · #Advanced Neural Network Applications #Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (cs.CV) #Domain Adaptation and Few-Shot Learning #FOS: Computer and information sciences #Machine Learning (cs.LG) #Machine Learning (stat.ML) #Video Surveillance and Tracking Methods
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.1711.03189
openalex publication_date 2017/11/08 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Convolution as inner product has been the founding basis of convolutional neural networks (CNNs) and the key to end-to-end visual representation learning. Benefiting from deeper architectures, recent CNNs have demonstrated increasingly strong representation abilities. Despite such improvement, the increased depth and larger parameter space have also led to challenges in properly training a network. In light of such challenges, we propose hyperspherical convolution (SphereConv), a novel learning framework that gives angular representations on hyperspheres. We introduce SphereNet, deep hyperspherical convolution networks that are distinct from conventional inner product based convolutional networks. In particular, SphereNet adopts SphereConv as its basic convolution operator and is supervised by generalized angular softmax loss - a natural loss formulation under SphereConv. We show that SphereNet can effectively encode discriminative representation and alleviate training difficulty, leading to easier optimization, faster convergence and comparable (even better) classification accuracy over convolutional counterparts. We also provide some theoretical insights for the advantages of learning on hyperspheres. In addition, we introduce the learnable SphereConv, i.e., a natural improvement over prefixed SphereConv, and SphereNorm, i.e., hyperspherical learning as a normalization method. Experiments have verified our conclusions.