AWR: Adaptive Weighting Regression for 3D Hand Pose Estimation

In this paper, we propose an adaptive weighting regression (AWR) method to leverage the advantages of both detection-based and regression-based methods. Hand joint coordinates are estimated as discrete integration of all pixels in dense representation, guided by adaptive weight maps. This learnable aggregation process introduces both dense and joint supervision that allows end-to-end training and brings adaptability to weight maps, making the network more accurate and robust. Comprehensive exploration experiments are conducted to validate the effectiveness and generality of AWR under various experimental settings, especially its usefulness for different types of dense representation and input modality. Our method outperforms other state-of-the-art methods on four publicly available datasets, including NYU, ICVL, MSRA and HANDS 2017 dataset.

OICSR: Out-In-Channel Sparsity Regularization for Compact Deep Neural Networks

Channel pruning can significantly accelerate and compress deep neural networks. Many channel pruning works utilize structured sparsity regularization to zero out all the weights in some channels and automatically obtain structure-sparse network in training stage. However, these methods apply structured sparsity regularization on each layer separately where the correlations between consecutive layers are omitted. In this paper, we first combine one out-channel in current layer and the corresponding in-channel in next layer as a regularization group, namely out-in-channel. Our proposed Out-In-Channel Sparsity Regularization (OICSR) considers correlations between successive layers to further retain predictive power of the compact network. Training with OICSR thoroughly transfers discriminative features into a fraction of out-in-channels. Correspondingly, OICSR measures channel importance based on statistics computed from two consecutive layers, not individual layer. Finally, a global greedy pruning algorithm is designed to remove redundant out-in-channels in an iterative way. Our method is comprehensively evaluated with various CNN architectures including CifarNet, AlexNet, ResNet, DenseNet and PreActSeNet on CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100 and ImageNet-1K datasets. Notably, on ImageNet-1K, we reduce 37.2% FLOPs on ResNet-50 while outperforming the original model by 0.22% top-1 accuracy.