OrthCaps: An Orthogonal CapsNet with Sparse Attention Routing and Pruning

Xinyu Geng, Jiaming Wang, Jiawei Gong, Yuerong Xue, Jun Xu, Fanglin Chen, Xiaolin Huang; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2024, pp. 6037-6046

Redundancy is a persistent challenge in Capsule Networks (CapsNet) leading to high computational costs and parameter counts. Although previous studies have introduced pruning after the initial capsule layer dynamic routing's fully connected nature and non-orthogonal weight matrices reintroduce redundancy in deeper layers. Besides dynamic routing requires iterating to converge further increasing computational demands. In this paper we propose an Orthogonal Capsule Network (OrthCaps) to reduce redundancy improve routing performance and decrease parameter counts. Firstly an efficient pruned capsule layer is introduced to discard redundant capsules. Secondly dynamic routing is replaced with orthogonal sparse attention routing eliminating the need for iterations and fully connected structures. Lastly weight matrices during routing are orthogonalized to sustain low capsule similarity which is the first approach to use Householder orthogonal decomposition to enforce orthogonality in CapsNet. Our experiments on baseline datasets affirm the efficiency and robustness of OrthCaps in classification tasks in which ablation studies validate the criticality of each component. OrthCaps-Shallow outperforms other Capsule Network benchmarks on four datasets utilizing only 110k parameters - a mere 1.25% of a standard Capsule Network's total. To the best of our knowledge it achieves the smallest parameter count among existing Capsule Networks. Similarly OrthCaps-Deep demonstrates competitive performance across four datasets utilizing only 1.2% of the parameters required by its counterparts.