Invariance and Equivariance

05 Imperial's Deep learning course: Equivariance and Invariance

Admin about this course: http://wp.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a4Quhf9NhMY&ab_channel=BernhardKainz

These 2 are important concepts in convnets.

→ Shift Invariant

This concept is very important in image recognition we have seen so far. Consider the following images:

Which of the following pictures has a cat inside? Of course, both are cats. This property is known as shift invariance, and is important for images to have this to be classified using convnets.

→ Shift Equivariant

Shift equivariance means the output shifts in the same way as the input → shift in output mirrors shift in input

What is the context of this in convnets?

→ Convolutions are shift-equivariant operations

Consider this:

No matter where I shift that black 3 in the left box, after a convolution with that 3-colour kernel, the coloured-3 will always mirror the shift of the black 3 → hence this operation is shift-equivariant

→ Pooling is shift-invariant (approximate)

Consider this:

In max-pooling, we are taking the maximum value within that kernel. So, even if the black 3 slightly shifts, the result of max-pooling does not change → hence this operation is shift-invariant