The state-of-the-art pooling strategies for perceptual image quality assessment (IQA) are based on the mean and the weighted mean. They are robust pooling strategies which usually provide a moderate to high performance for different IQAs. Recently, standard deviation (SD) pooling was also proposed. Although, this deviation pooling provides a very high performance for a few IQAs, its performance...

Pooling is an important component in convolutional neural networks (CNNs) for aggregating features and reducing computational burden. Compared with other components such as convolutional layers and fully connected layers which are completely learned from data, the pooling component is still handcrafted such as max pooling and average pooling. This paper proposes a learnable pooling function usi...

Sparse Coding, a popular feature coding method, has shown superior performance in visual recognition tasks. Different pooling methods, such as average pooling and max pooling, are commonly employed after feature coding. However, it has not been explained clearly what characteristic accounts for the success of pooling method. In this paper, a new pooling method, namely protected pooling, is prop...

Many theories have emerged which investigate how invariance is generated in hierarchical networks through simple schemes such as max and mean pooling. The restriction to max/mean pooling in theoretical and empirical studies has diverted attention away from a more general way of generating invariance to nuisance transformations. In this exploratory study, we study the conjecture that hierarchica...

This paper studies the effects of resource pooling on system performance in the presence of failures. The goal is to understand whether pooling increases efficiency and/or reduces risk. We consider four queueing systems with different degrees of pooling (one has no pooling, one has only queues pooled, one has queues and failures pooled, and one has servers pooled), estimate efficiency via the m...

A pooling space is a ranked poset P such that the subposet w+ induced by the elements above w is atomic for each element w of P . Pooling spaces were introduced in [Discrete Mathematics 282:163-169, 2004] for the purpose of giving a uniform way to construct pooling designs, which have applications to the screening of DNA sequences. Many examples of pooling spaces were given in that paper. In th...

The need for quantifying the effect of resource pooling on performance of multi-processing systems arises frequently in the design of a variety of manufacturing, communication, and service systems. In this paper, we examine the effect of resource pooling and assess its impact on system performance. In particular, we provide performance bounds on the effectiveness of several pooling scenarios an...