Rethinking the Role of Spatial Mixing

Fuente: arXiv
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Hauptverfasser: Cazenavette, George, Julin, Joel, Lucey, Simon
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2025
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author Cazenavette, George
Julin, Joel
Lucey, Simon
author_facet Cazenavette, George
Julin, Joel
Lucey, Simon
contents Until quite recently, the backbone of nearly every state-of-the-art computer vision model has been the 2D convolution. At its core, a 2D convolution simultaneously mixes information across both the spatial and channel dimensions of a representation. Many recent computer vision architectures consist of sequences of isotropic blocks that disentangle the spatial and channel-mixing components. This separation of the operations allows us to more closely juxtapose the effects of spatial and channel mixing in deep learning. In this paper, we take an initial step towards garnering a deeper understanding of the roles of these mixing operations. Through our experiments and analysis, we discover that on both classical (ResNet) and cutting-edge (ConvMixer) models, we can reach nearly the same level of classification performance by and leaving the spatial mixers at their random initializations. Furthermore, we show that models with random, fixed spatial mixing are naturally more robust to adversarial perturbations. Lastly, we show that this phenomenon extends past the classification regime, as such models can also decode pixel-shuffled images.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2503_16760
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Rethinking the Role of Spatial Mixing
Cazenavette, George
Julin, Joel
Lucey, Simon
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Machine Learning
Until quite recently, the backbone of nearly every state-of-the-art computer vision model has been the 2D convolution. At its core, a 2D convolution simultaneously mixes information across both the spatial and channel dimensions of a representation. Many recent computer vision architectures consist of sequences of isotropic blocks that disentangle the spatial and channel-mixing components. This separation of the operations allows us to more closely juxtapose the effects of spatial and channel mixing in deep learning. In this paper, we take an initial step towards garnering a deeper understanding of the roles of these mixing operations. Through our experiments and analysis, we discover that on both classical (ResNet) and cutting-edge (ConvMixer) models, we can reach nearly the same level of classification performance by and leaving the spatial mixers at their random initializations. Furthermore, we show that models with random, fixed spatial mixing are naturally more robust to adversarial perturbations. Lastly, we show that this phenomenon extends past the classification regime, as such models can also decode pixel-shuffled images.
title Rethinking the Role of Spatial Mixing
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.16760