Deep Mixture of Diverse Experts for Large-Scale Visual Recognition

In this paper, a deep mixture of diverse experts algorithm is developed to achieve more efficient learning of a huge (mixture) network for large-scale visual recognition application. First, a two-layer ontology is constructed to assign large numbers of atomic object classes into a set of task groups according to the similarities of their learning complexities, where certain degrees of inter-group task overlapping are allowed to enable sufficient inter-group message passing. Second, one particular base deep CNNs with M+1 outputs is learned for each task group to recognize its M atomic object classes and identify one special class of "not-in-group", where the network structure (numbers of layers and units in each layer) of the well-designed deep CNNs (such as AlexNet, VGG, GoogleNet, ResNet) is directly used to configure such base deep CNNs. For enhancing the separability of the atomic object classes in the same task group, two approaches are developed to learn more discriminative base deep CNNs: (a) our deep multi-task learning algorithm that can effectively exploit the inter-class visual similarities; (b) our two-layer network cascade approach that can improve the accuracy rates for the hard object classes at certain degrees while effectively maintaining the high accuracy rates for the easy ones. Finally, all these complementary base deep CNNs with diverse but overlapped outputs are seamlessly combined to generate a mixture network with larger outputs for recognizing tens of thousands of atomic object classes. Our experimental results have demonstrated that our deep mixture of diverse experts algorithm can achieve very competitive results on large-scale visual recognition.