Lp-Norm Constrained Coding With Frank-Wolfe Network

We investigate the problem of Lp-norm constrained coding, i.e. converting signal into code that lies inside the Lp-ball and most faithfully reconstructs the signal. While previous works known as sparse coding have addressed the cases of `0 "norm" and L1-norm, more general cases with other p values, especially with unknown p, remain a difficulty. We propose the Frank-Wolfe Network (F-W Net), whose architecture is inspired by unrolling and truncating the Frank-Wolfe algorithm for solving an Lp-norm constrained problem. We show that the Frank-Wolfe solver for the Lp-norm constraint leads to a novel closed-form nonlinear unit, which is parameterized by p and termed poolp. The poolp unit links the conventional pooling, activation, and normalization operations, making F-W Net distinct from existing deep models either heuristically designed or converted from projection gradient descent or proximal algorithms. We further show that the hyper-parameter p can be made learnable instead of pre-chosen in F-W Net, which gracefully solves the Lp-norm constrained coding problem with unknown p. A convolutional extension of F-W Net is then presented. We evaluate the performance of F-W Net on an extensive range of simulations to show the strong learning capability of F-W Net. We then adopt F-W Net or Convolutional F-W Net on a series of real-data tasks that are all formulated as Lp-norm constrained coding, including image classification, image denoising, and super-resolution, where F-W Net all demonstrates impressive effectiveness, flexibility, and