Deep Convolutional Tables: Deep Learning without Convolutions

We propose a novel formulation of deep networks that do not use dot-product neurons and rely on a hierarchy of voting tables instead, denoted as Convolutional Tables (CT), to enable accelerated CPU-based inference. Convolutional layers are the most time-consuming bottleneck in contemporary deep learning techniques, severely limiting their use in Internet of Things and CPU-based devices. The proposed CT performs a fern operation at each image location: it encodes the location environment into a binary index and uses the index to retrieve the desired local output from a table. The results of multiple tables are combined to derive the final output. The computational complexity of a CT transformation is independent of the patch (filter) size and grows gracefully with the number of channels, outperforming comparable convolutional layers. It is shown to have a better capacity:compute ratio than dot-product neurons, and that deep CT networks exhibit a universal approximation property similar to neural networks. As the transformation involves computing discrete indices, we derive a soft relaxation and gradient-based approach for training the CT hierarchy. Deep CT networks have been experimentally shown to have accuracy comparable to that of CNNs of similar architectures. In the low compute regime, they enable an error:speed trade-off superior to alternative efficient CNN architectures.