Intermediate features at different layers of a deep neural network are known
to be discriminative for visual patterns of different complexities. However,
most existing works ignore such cross-layer heterogeneities when classifying
samples of different complexities. For example, if a training sample has
already been correctly classified at a specific layer with high confidence, we
argue that it is unnecessary to enforce rest layers to classify this sample
correctly and a better strategy is to encourage those layers to focus on other
samples.
In this paper, we propose a layer-wise discriminative learning method to
enhance the discriminative capability of a deep network by allowing its layers
to work collaboratively for classification. Towards this target, we introduce
multiple classifiers on top of multiple layers. Each classifier not only tries
to correctly classify the features from its input layer, but also coordinates
with other classifiers to jointly maximize the final classification
performance. Guided by the other companion classifiers, each classifier learns
to concentrate on certain training examples and boosts the overall performance.
Allowing for end-to-end training, our method can be conveniently embedded into
state-of-the-art deep networks. Experiments with multiple popular deep
networks, including Network in Network, GoogLeNet and VGGNet, on scale-various
object classification benchmarks, including CIFAR100, MNIST and ImageNet, and
scene classification benchmarks, including MIT67, SUN397 and Places205,
demonstrate the effectiveness of our method. In addition, we also analyze the
relationship between the proposed method and classical conditional random
fields models.

本文提出了一种基于层的鉴别性学习方法来增强深度神经网络的鉴别能力，在多个层上引入多个分类器，使它们协同工作进行分类，通过对多个深度网络和基准数据集的实验，证明了该方法的有效性，并分析了该方法和经典条件随机场模型之间的关系。