  Deep neural networks have been the driving force behind the success in
classification tasks, e.g., object and audio recognition. Impressive results
and generalization have been achieved by a variety of recently proposed
architectures, the majority of which are seemingly disconnected. In this work,
we cast the study of deep classifiers under a unifying framework. In
particular, we express state-of-the-art architectures (e.g., residual and
non-local networks) in the form of different degree polynomials of the input.
Our framework provides insights on the inductive biases of each model and
enables natural extensions building upon their polynomial nature. The efficacy
of the proposed models is evaluated on standard image and audio classification
benchmarks. The expressivity of the proposed models is highlighted both in
terms of increased model performance as well as model compression. Lastly, the
extensions allowed by this taxonomy showcase benefits in the presence of
limited data and long-tailed data distributions. We expect this taxonomy to
provide links between existing domain-specific architectures.
