Dual-Perspective Activation: Efficient Channel Denoising via Joint Forward-Backward Criterion for Artificial Neural Networks

The design of Artificial Neural Network (ANN) is inspired by the working patterns of the human brain. Connections in biological neural networks are sparse, as they only exist between few neurons. Meanwhile, the sparse representation in ANNs has been shown to possess significant advantages. Activation responses of ANNs are typically expected to promote sparse representations, where key signals get activated while irrelevant/redundant signals are suppressed. It can be observed that samples of each category are only correlated with sparse and specific channels in ANNs. However, existing activation mechanisms often struggle to suppress signals from other irrelevant channels entirely, and these signals have been verified to be detrimental to the network's final decision. To address the issue of channel noise interference in ANNs, a novel end-to-end trainable Dual-Perspective Activation (DPA) mechanism is proposed. DPA efficiently identifies irrelevant channels and applies channel denoising under the guidance of a joint criterion established online from both forward and backward propagation perspectives while preserving activation responses from relevant channels. Extensive experiments demonstrate that DPA successfully denoises channels and facilitates sparser neural representations. Moreover, DPA is parameter-free, fast, applicable to many mainstream ANN architectures, and achieves remarkable performance compared to other existing activation counterparts across multiple tasks and domains. Code is available at https://github.com/horrible-dong/DPA.