PeLK: Parameter-efficient Large Kernel ConvNets with Peripheral Convolution

Honghao Chen, Xiangxiang Chu, Yongjian Ren, Xin Zhao, Kaiqi Huang; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2024, pp. 5557-5567

Recently some large kernel convnets strike back with appealing performance and efficiency. However given the square complexity of convolution scaling up kernels can bring about an enormous amount of parameters and the proliferated parameters can induce severe optimization problem. Due to these issues current CNNs compromise to scale up to 51x51 in the form of stripe convolution (i.e. 51x5+5x51) and start to saturate as the kernel size continues growing. In this paper we delve into addressing these vital issues and explore whether we can continue scaling up kernels for more performance gains. Inspired by human vision we propose a human-like peripheral convolution that efficiently reduces over 90% parameter count of dense grid convolution through parameter sharing and manage to scale up kernel size to extremely large. Our peripheral convolution behaves highly similar to human reducing the complexity of convolution from O(K^2) to O(logK) without backfiring performance. Built on this we propose Parameter-efficient Large Kernel Network (PeLK). Our PeLK outperforms modern vision Transformers and ConvNet architectures like Swin ConvNeXt RepLKNet and SLaK on various vision tasks including ImageNet classification semantic segmentation on ADE20K and object detection on MS COCO. For the first time we successfully scale up the kernel size of CNNs to an unprecedented 101x101 and demonstrate consistent improvements.