Exploring Kervolutional Neural Networks

Abstract: A paper published in the CVPR 2019 conference outlines a new technique called 'kervolution' used in a new type of augmented convolutional neural network (CNN) called a 'kervolutional neural network' (KNN). The paper asserts that KNNs achieve faster convergence and higher accuracies than CNNs. This "mini paper" will further examine the findings in the original paper and perform a more in depth analysis of the KNN architecture. This will be done by analyzing the impact of hyper parameters (specifically the learning rate) on KNNs versus CNNs, experimenting with other types of kervolution operations not tested in the original paper, a more rigourous statistical analysis of accuracies and convergence times and additional theoretical analysis. The accompanying code is publicly available.