Aggregation with Feature Detection

Aggregating features from different depths of a network is widely adopted to improve the network capability. Lots of modern architectures are equipped with skip connections, which actually makes the feature aggregation happen in all these networks. Since different features tell different semantic meanings, there are inconsistencies and incompatibilities to be solved. However, existing works naïvely blend deep features via element-wise summation or concatenation with a convolution behind. Better feature aggregation method beyond summation or concatenation is rarely explored. In this paper, given two layers of features to be aggregated together, we first detect and identify where and what needs to be updated in one layer, then replace the feature at the identified location with the information of the other layer. This process, which we call DEtect-rePLAce (DEPLA), enables us to avoid inconsistent patterns while keeping useful information in the merged outputs. Experimental results demonstrate our method largely boosts multiple baselines e.g. ResNet, FishNet and FPN on three major vision tasks including ImageNet classification, MS COCO object detection and instance segmentation.