摘要

Deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have achieved unprecedented success in many domains. The numerous parameters allow CNNs to learn complex features, but also tend to hinder generalisation by over-fitting training data. Despite many previously proposed regularisation methods, over-fitting is one of many problems in training a robust CNN. Among many factors that may lead to over-fitting, the numerous parameters of fully connected layers (FCLs) of a typical CNN are a contributor to the over-fitting problem. The authors propose SparseConnect, which alleviates over-fitting by sparsifying connections to FCLs. Experimental results on three benchmark datasets MNIST and CIFAR10 show SparseConnect outperforms several state-of-the-art regularisation methods.