Nonlocal Neural Networks, Nonlocal Diffusion and Nonlocal Modeling

Part of Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 31 (NeurIPS 2018)

Bibtex Metadata Paper Reviews Supplemental

Authors

Yunzhe Tao, Qi Sun, Qiang Du, Wei Liu

Abstract

Nonlocal neural networks have been proposed and shown to be effective in several computer vision tasks, where the nonlocal operations can directly capture long-range dependencies in the feature space. In this paper, we study the nature of diffusion and damping effect of nonlocal networks by doing spectrum analysis on the weight matrices of the well-trained networks, and then propose a new formulation of the nonlocal block. The new block not only learns the nonlocal interactions but also has stable dynamics, thus allowing deeper nonlocal structures. Moreover, we interpret our formulation from the general nonlocal modeling perspective, where we make connections between the proposed nonlocal network and other nonlocal models, such as nonlocal diffusion process and Markov jump process.