A Lightweight U-like Network Utilizing Neural Memory Ordinary Differential Equations for Slimming the Decoder

A Lightweight U-like Network Utilizing Neural Memory Ordinary Differential Equations for Slimming the Decoder

Quansong He, Xiaojun Yao, Jun Wu, Zhang Yi, Tao He

Proceedings of the Thirty-Third International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence
Main Track. Pages 821-829. https://doi.org/10.24963/ijcai.2024/91

In recent years, advanced U-like networks have demonstrated remarkable performance in medical image segmentation tasks. However, their drawbacks, including excessive parameters, high computational complexity, and slow inference speed, pose challenges for practical implementation in scenarios with limited computational resources. Existing lightweight U-like networks have alleviated some problems, but they often have pre-designed structures and consist of non-detachable modules, limiting their application scenarios. In this paper, we propose three plug-and-play decoders by employing different discretization methods of the neural memory Ordinary Differential Equation (nmODE). These decoders integrate features at various levels of abstraction by processing information from skip connections and performing numerical operations on upward paths. Through experiments on the PH2, ISIC2017, and ISIC2018 datasets, we embed these decoders into different U-like networks, demonstrating their effectiveness in significantly reducing the number of parameters and computation while maintaining performance. In summary, the proposed discretized nmODE decoder is capable of reducing the number of parameters by about 20% ~ 50% and computation by up to 74%, while being adaptive to all U-like networks. Our code is available at https://github.com/nayutayuki/Lightweight-nmODE-Decoders-For-U-like-networks.
Keywords:
Computer Vision: CV: Segmentation
Computer Vision: CV: Biomedical image analysis
Computer Vision: CV: Machine learning for vision
Machine Learning: ML: Convolutional networks