Diversity-Learning Block: Conquer Feature Homogenization of Multibranch

Visual Geometry Group (VGG)-style ConvNet is an neural-network process units (NPU)-friendly network; however, the accuracy of this architecture cannot keep up with other well-designed network structures. Although some reparameterization methods are proposed to remedy this weakness, their performance suffers from the homogenization issue of parallel branches, and the preset shape of convolution kernels also influences spatial perception. To address this problem, we propose a diversity-learning (DL) block to build the DLNet, which could adaptively learn various features to enrich the feature space. To balance floating point of operations (FLOPs) and accuracy, groupwise operation is introduced and finally, a lightweight DL ConvNet DLGNet is obtained. Extensive evaluations have been conducted on different computer vision tasks, e.g., image classification [Canadian Institute For Advanced Research (CIFAR) and ImageNet], object detection [PASCAL visual object classes (VOC) and Microsoft Common Objects in Context (MS COCO)], and semantic segmentation (Cityscapes). The experimental results show that our proposed DLGNet can achieve comparable performance with the state-of-the-art networks while the speed is 183% faster than GhostNet and even over 600% faster than MobileNetV3 with similar accuracy when running on NPU.