Multigrid-in-Channels Neural Network Architectures

We present a multigrid-in-channels (MGIC) approach that tackles the quadratic growth of the number of parameters with respect to the number of channels in standard convolutional neural networks (CNNs). It has been shown that there is a redundancy in standard CNNs, as networks with light or sparse convolution operators yield similar performance to full networks. However, the number of parameters in the former networks also scales quadratically in width, while in the latter case, the parameters typically have random sparsity patterns, hampering hardware efficiency. Our approach for building CNN architectures scales linearly with respect to the network's width while retaining full coupling of the channels as in standard CNNs. To this end, we replace each convolution block with its MGIC block utilizing a hierarchy of lightweight convolutions. Our extensive experiments on image classification, segmentation, and point cloud classification show that applying this strategy to different architectures like ResNet and MobileNetV3 considerably reduces the number of parameters while obtaining similar or better accuracy. For example, we obtain 76.1% top-1 accuracy on ImageNet with a lightweight network with similar parameters and FLOPs to MobileNetV3.