Learning Personalized Modular Network Guided by Structured Knowledge

Xiaodan Liang; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2019, pp. 8944-8952

The dominant deep learning approaches use a "one-size-fits-all" paradigm with the hope that underlying characteristics of diverse inputs can be captured via a fixed structure. They also overlook the importance of explicitly modeling feature hierarchy. However, complex real-world tasks often require discovering diverse reasoning paths for different inputs to achieve satisfying predictions, especially for challenging large-scale recognition tasks with complex label relations. In this paper, we treat the structured commonsense knowledge (e.g. concept hierarchy) as the guidance of customizing more powerful and explainable network structures for distinct inputs, leading to dynamic and individualized inference paths. Give an off-the-shelf large network configuration, the proposed Personalized Modular Network (PMN) is learned by selectively activating a sequence of network modules where each of them is designated to recognize particular levels of structured knowledge. Learning semantic configurations and activation of modules to align well with structured knowledge can be regarded as a decision-making procedure, which is solved by a new graph-based reinforcement learning algorithm. Experiments on three semantic segmentation tasks and classification tasks show our PMN can achieve superior performance with the reduced number of network modules while discovering personalized and explainable module configurations for each input.