Dynamic Weight Alignment for Temporal Convolutional Neural Networks

In this paper, we propose a method of improving Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) by determining the optimal alignment of weights and inputs using dynamic programming. Conventional CNNs convolve learnable shared weights, or filters, across the input data. These filters use an inner product to linearly match the shared weights to a window of the input. However, it is possible that there exists a more optimal alignment of weights. Thus, we propose the use of Dynamic Time Warping (DTW) to dynamically align the weights to optimized input elements. This dynamic alignment is especially useful for time series recognition due to the complexities with temporal distortions, such as varying rates and sequence lengths. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed architecture on the Unipen online handwritten digit and character datasets, the UCI Spoken Arabic Digit dataset, and the UCI Activities of Daily Life dataset.