Partial Least Squares: A Deep Space Odyssey

Modern visual pattern recognition models are based on deep convolutional networks. Such models are computationally expensive, hindering applicability on resource-constrained devices. To handle this problem, we propose three strategies. The first removes unimportant structures (neurons or layers) of convolutional networks, reducing their computational cost. The second inserts structures to design architectures automatically, enabling us to build high-performance networks. The third combines multiple layers of convolutional networks, enhancing data representation at negligible additional cost. These strategies are based on Partial Least Squares (PLS) which, despite promising results, is infeasible on large datasets due to memory constraints. To address this issue, we also propose a discriminative and low-complexity incremental PLS that learns a compact representation of the data using a single sample at a time, thus enabling applicability on large datasets.