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Title: Diversity and Depth in Per-Example Routing Models

Paper content:
Routing models, a form of conditional computation where examples are routed through a subset of components in a larger network, have shown promising results in recent works.
Surprisingly, routing models to date have lacked important properties, such as architectural diversity and large numbers of routing decisions.
Both architectural diversity and routing depth can increase the representational power of a routing network.
In this work, we address both of these deficiencies.
We discuss the significance of architectural diversity in routing models, and explain the tradeoffs between capacity and optimization when increasing routing depth.
In our experiments, we find that adding architectural diversity to routing models significantly improves performance, cutting the error rates of a strong baseline by 35% on an Omniglot setup.
However, when scaling up routing depth, we find that modern routing techniques struggle with optimization.
We conclude by discussing both the positive and negative results, and suggest directions for future research.
Modern neural networks process each input in the exact same way.
This static paradigm is rigid compared to how brains process sensory inputs.
Brains can utilize different subnetworks to process different categories of objects, such as face-specific processing in the fusiform face area BID27 BID17 .
While static neural networks are empirically effective, it remains an open question whether neural networks with input-dependent processing can improve performance.
Input-dependent processing holds the promise of offering better parameter efficiency and reduced computation due to the specialization of processing.Input-dependent processing has been underexplored in comparison with the wealth of work on static networks.
Much of the work exploring input-dependent processing has taken the form of per-example routing within a network BID44 BID12 BID35 BID41 , which is form of conditional computation BID3 .
In per-example routing, different examples are processed by different subcomponents, or experts BID23 , inside a larger model, or supernetwork BID12 .
Only a subset of experts in the supernetwork are active for any given example.
This paradigm enables the experts, each of which has its own set of parameters, to specialize to subsets of the input domain.
The process of routing each example, which determines the experts that are used, is learned jointly with the parameters of the experts.Routing models to date have been relatively small, homogeneous networks.
Typically, the same architectural unit (e.g., a fully connected layer of the same width) is used for every expert.
The experts differ only in the parameters.
Intuitively, the diversity of input examples is best handled by a diversity of architectural units with varying properties, implying that the usage of homogeneous experts is limiting.
Furthermore, the number of routing decisions made in prior routing network works has typically been five or fewer.
More routing decisions increase the number of distinct paths in the network, which may increase representational power.
Making static networks deeper reliably improves performance, so we suspect that the representational power of routing networks is limited when only a few routing decisions are made.In this work, we address these two deficiencies in routing models.
Since we aim to increase the representational capacities of routing models, we first introduce a simple trick that reduces overfitting.We then show how routing models with architectural diversity represent a broad family of models that generalize a number of powerful models.
We also discuss the tradeoffs of scaling up the number of routing decisions with respect to optimization difficulty.
In our experiments, we demonstrate that architecturally diverse routing models beat the best baselines with a 35% improvement in error rate on an Omniglot setup.
By ablating the architectural diversity, we show that diversity plays a key role in achieving strong performance.
We then scale up the number of decisions in routing models on CIFAR-10 and demonstrate that while competitive performance can be achieved, the accuracy drops as the number of decisions increase due to optimization challenges.
Finally, we discuss our both our positive and negative findings and suggest future research directions for routing models.
In this work, we introduced diversity to routing models and experimented with increasing routing depth.
We believe that these two ideas are both intuitive and simple for researchers to implement.
In our experiments, we found that architectural diversity can have a big impact in final performance.
However, the impact of routing depth remains uncertain due to optimization difficulties faced by current methods.While routing models are a promising direction of research, practitioners still prefer static models due to their simplicity and reliable performance.
For the use of routing models to become widespread, there must be a successful application of routing models on a domain where static models struggle.
We believe that large scale problems fit this criteria, since they play into the theoretical scaling strengths of routing models.
While architectural diversity will help improve routing models on large scale tasks, the routing depth optimization problem will continue to impede success.
We encourage researchers to develop methods that will enable routing methods to effectively scale on large scale tasks.
We remain optimistic that routing models will play an important role in the neural networks of the future.

assistant: text: Per-example routing models benefit from architectural diversity, but still struggle to scale to a large number of routing decisions.