Title: Spherical CNNs
Authors: Taco S. Cohen
Mario Geiger
Jonas Köhler
Max Welling
Venue: ICLR 2018
Keywords: deep learning
equivariance
convolution
group convolution
3D
vision
omnidirectional
shape recognition
molecular energy regression

Abstract: Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) have become the method of choice for learning problems involving 2D planar images. However, a number of problems of recent interest have created a demand for models that can analyze spherical images. Examples include omnidirectional vision for drones, robots, and autonomous cars, molecular regression problems, and global weather and climate modelling. A naive application of convolutional networks to a planar projection of the spherical signal is destined to fail, because the space-varying distortions introduced by such a projection will make translational weight sharing ineffective.

In this paper we introduce the building blocks for constructing spherical CNNs. We propose a definition for the spherical cross-correlation that is both expressive and rotation-equivariant. The spherical correlation satisfies a generalized Fourier theorem, which allows us to compute it efficiently using a generalized (non-commutative) Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) algorithm. We demonstrate the computational efficiency, numerical accuracy, and effectiveness of spherical CNNs applied to 3D model recognition and atomization energy regression.

TL;DR: We introduce Spherical CNNs, a convolutional network for spherical signals, and apply it to 3D model recognition and molecular energy regression.

Review discussion:
Summary:
The paper proposes a framework for constructing spherical convolutional networks (ConvNets) based on a novel synthesis of several existing concepts.  The goal is to detect patterns in spherical signals irrespective of how they are rotated on the sphere.  The key is to make the convolutional architecture rotation equivariant.
Pros:
+ novel/original proposal justified both theoretically and empirically
+ well written, easy to follow
+ limited evaluation on a classification and regression task is suggestive of the proposed approach's potential
+ efficient implementation
Cons:
- related work, in particular the first paragraph, should compare and contrast with the closest extant work rather than merely list them
- evaluation is limited;
granted this is the nature of the target domain
Presentation:
While the paper is generally written well, the paper appears to conflate the definition of the convolutional and correlation operators?  This point should be clarified in a revised manuscript.
In Section 5 (Experiments), there are several references to S^2CNN.  This naming of the proposed approach should be made clear earlier in the manuscript.  As an aside, this appears a little confusing since convolution is performed first on S^2 and then SO(3).
Evaluation:
What are the timings of the forward/backward pass and space considerations for the Spherical ConvNets presented in the evaluation section?  Please provide specific numbers for the various tasks presented.
How many layers (parameters) are used in the baselines in Table 2?  If indeed there are much less parameters used in the proposed approach, this would strengthen the argument for the approach.
On the other hand, was there an attempt to add additional layers to the proposed approach for the shape recognition experiment in Sec. 5.3 to improve performance?
Minor Points:
- some references are missing their source, e.g., Maslen 1998 and Kostolec, Rockmore, 2007, and Ravanbakhsh, et al. 2016.
- some sources for the references are presented inconsistency, e.g., Cohen and Welling, 2017 and Dieleman, et al. 2017
- some references include the first name of the authors, others use the initial
- in references to et al. or not, appears inconsistent
- Eqns 4, 5, 6, and 8 require punctuation
- Section 4 line 2, period missing before "Since the FFT"
- "coulomb matrix" --> "Coulomb matrix"
- Figure 5, caption: "The red dot correcpond to" --> "The red dot corresponds to"
Final remarks:
Based on the novelty of the approach, and the sufficient evaluation, I recommend the paper be accepted.
Thank you for the detailed and balanced review.
RE Related work: we have expanded the related work section a little bit in order to contrast with previous work. (Unfortunately there is no space for a very long discussion)
RE Convolution vs correlation: thank you for pointing this out. Our reasoning had been that:
1) Everybody in deep learning uses the word "convolution" to mean "cross-correlation".
2) In the non-commutative case, there are several different but essentially equivalent convolution-like integrals that one can define, with no really good reason to prefer one over the other.
But we did not explain this properly. We think a reasonable approach is to call something group convolution if, for the translation group it specializes to the standard convolution, and similarly for group correlations. This seems to be what several others before us have done as well, so we will follow this convention.
Specifically, we will define the (group) cross-correlation as:
psi \star f(g) = int psi(g^{-1} h) f(h) dh.
RE The S^2CNN name: we have now defined this term in the introduction, but not changed it, because the paper is called "Spherical CNN" and S^2-CNN is just a shorthand for that name.
RE Timings: we have added timings, memory usage numbers, and number of parameters to the paper. It is not always possible to compare the number of parameters to related work because those numbers are not always available.
However, we can reasonably assume that the competing methods did their own cross-validation to arrive at an optimal model complexity for their architecture. (Also, in deep networks, the absolute number of parameters can often vary widely between architectures that have a similar generalization performance, making this a rather poor measure of model complexity.)
RE References and other minor points: we have fixed all of these issues. Thanks for pointing them out.
The focus of the paper is how to extend convolutional neural networks to have built-in spherical invariance.  Such a requirement naturally emerges when working with omnidirectional vision (autonomous cars, drones, ...).
To get invariance on the sphere (S^2), the idea is to consider the group of rotations on S^2 [SO(3)] and spherical convolution [Eq. (4)]. To be able to compute this convolution efficiently, a generalized Fourier theorem is useful. In order to achieve this goal, the authors adapt tools from non-Abelian [SO(3)] harmonic analysis.  The validity of the idea is illustrated on 3D shape recognition and atomization energy prediction.
The paper is nicely organized and clearly written; it fits to the focus of ICLR and can be applicable on many other domains as well.
Thank you very much for taking the time to review our work.
Thank you for the feedback; I maintain my opinion.
First off, this paper was a delight to read.  The authors develop an (actually) novel scheme for representing spherical data from the ground up, and test it on three wildly different empirical tasks: Spherical MNIST, 3D-object recognition, and atomization energies from molecular geometries.  They achieve near state-of-the-art performance against other special-purpose networks that aren't nearly as general as their new framework.  The paper was also exceptionally clear and well written.
The only con (which is more a suggestion than anything)--it would be nice if the authors compared the training time/# of parameters of their model versus the closest competitors for the latter two empirical examples.  This can sometimes be an apples-to-oranges comparison, but it's nice to fully contextualize the comparative advantage of this new scheme over others.
That is, does it perform as well and train just as fast?  Does it need fewer parameters?  etc.
I strongly endorse acceptance.
Thank you for the kind words, we're glad you like our work!
Our models for SHREC17 and QM7 both use only about 1.4M parameters. On a machine with 1 Titan X GPU, training the SHREC17 model takes about 50 hours, while the QM7 model takes only about 3 hours. Memory usage is 8GB for SHREC (batchsize 16) and 7GB for QM7 (batchsize 20).
We have studied the SHREC17 paper [1], but unfortunately it does not state the number of parameters or training time for the various methods. It does seem likely that each of the competition participants did their own cross validation, and arrived at an appropriate model complexity for their method. It is thus unlikely that the strong performance of our model relative to others can be explained by its size (especially since 1.4M parameters is not considered very large anymore).
For QM7, it looks like Montavon et al. used about 760k parameters (we have deduced this from the description of their network architecture). Since the model is a simple multi-layer perceptron applied to a hand-designed feature representation, we expect that it is substantially faster to train than our model (though indeed comparing a spherical CNN to an engineered features+MLP approach is a bit of an apples-to-oranges comparison). Raj et al. use a non-parametric method, so there is no parameter count or training time to compare to.
[1] M. Savva et al. SHREC’17 Track Large-Scale 3D Shape Retrieval from ShapeNet Core55, Eurographics Workshop on 3D Object Retreival (2017).

Meta-review:
role: PC
data: comment: This work introduces a trainable signal representation for spherical signals (functions defined in the sphere) which are rotationally equivariant by design, by extending CNNs to the corresponding group SO(3). The method is implemented efficiently using fast Fourier transforms on the sphere and illustrated with compelling tasks such as 3d shape recognition and molecular energy prediction.

Reviewers agreed this is a solid, well-written paper, which demonstrates the usefulness of group invariance/equivariance beyond the standard Euclidean translation group in real-world scenarios. It will be a great addition to the conference. 

Decision: Accept (Oral)