Improved deep CNNs based on Nonlinear Hybrid Attention Module for image classification.

Recent years have witnessed numerous successful applications of incorporating attention module into feed-forward convolutional neural networks. Along this line of research, we design a novel lightweight general-purpose attention module by simultaneously taking channel attention and spatial attention into consideration. Specifically, inspired by the characteristics of channel attention and spatial attention, a nonlinear hybrid method is proposed to combine such two types of attention feature maps, which is highly beneficial to better network fine-tuning. Further, the parameters of each attention branch can be adjustable for the purpose of making the attention module more flexible and adaptable. From another point of view, we found that the currently popular SE, and CBAM modules are actually two particular cases of our proposed attention module. We also explore the latest attention module ADCM. To validate the module, we conduct experiments on CIFAR10, CIFAR100, Fashion MINIST datasets. Results show that, after integrating with our attention module, existing networks tend to be more efficient in training process and have better performance as compared with state-of-the-art competitors. Also, it is worthy to stress the following two points: (1) our attention module can be used in existing state-of-the-art deep architectures and get better performance at a small computational cost; (2) the module can be added to existing deep architectures in a simple way through stacking the integration of networks block and our module.