RES-SE-NET: Boosting Performance of Resnets by Enhancing Bridge-connections

One of the ways to train deep neural networks effectively is to use residual connections. Residual connections can be classified as being either identity connections or bridge-connections with a reshaping convolution. Empirical observations on CIFAR-10 and CIFAR-100 datasets using a baseline Resnet model, with bridge-connections removed, have shown a significant reduction in accuracy. This reduction is due to lack of contribution, in the form of feature maps, by the bridge-connections. Hence bridge-connections are vital for Resnet. However, all feature maps in the bridge-connections are considered to be equally important. In this work, an upgraded architecture "Res-SE-Net" is proposed to further strengthen the contribution from the bridge-connections by quantifying the importance of each feature map and weighting them accordingly using Squeeze-and-Excitation (SE) block. It is demonstrated that Res-SE-Net generalizes much better than Resnet and SE-Resnet on the benchmark CIFAR-10 and CIFAR-100 datasets.