While CNNs naturally lend themselves to densely sampled data, and sophisticated implementations are available, they lack the ability to efficiently process sparse data. In this work we introduce a suite of tools that exploit sparsity in both the feature maps and the filter weights, and thereby allow for significantly lower memory footprints and computation times than the conventional dense framework when processing data with a high degree of sparsity. Our scheme provides (i) an efficient GPU implementation of a convolution layer based on direct, sparse convolution; (ii) a filter step within the convolution layer, which we call attention, that prevents fill-in, i.e., the tendency of convolution to rapidly decrease sparsity, and guarantees an upper bound on the computational resources; and (iii) an adaptation of the back-propagation algorithm, which makes it possible to combine our approach with standard learning frameworks, while still exploiting sparsity in the data and the model.

本文介绍一种利用CNNs 去处理罕见数据的工具套件，包括直接稀疏卷积、注意力机制避免填充，以及适用于标准学习框架的反向传播算法改进，可以实现比传统密集框架更低的内存足迹和计算时间。

利用和保持卷积网络中的稀疏性的推断、学习和注意力机制