A deep convolutional neural network module that promotes competition of multiple-size filters

We introduce a new deep convolutional neural network (ConvNet) module that promotes competition amongst a set of convolutional filters of multiple sizes. This new module is inspired by the inception module, where we replace the original collaborative pooling stage (consisting of a concatenation of the multiple size filter outputs) by a competitive pooling represented by a maxout activation unit. This extension has the following two objectives: 1) the selection of the maximum response amongst the multiple size filters prevents filter co-adaptation and allows the formation of multiple sub-networks within the same model, which has been shown to facilitate the training of complex learning problems; and 2) the maxout unit reduces the dimensionality of the outputs from the multiple size filters. We show that the use of our proposed module in typical deep ConvNets produces classification results that are competitive with the state-of-the-art results on the following benchmark datasets: MNIST, CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, SVHN, and ImageNet ILSVRC 2012.