Curriculum by Smoothing

Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) have shown impressive performance in computer vision tasks such as image classification, detection, and segmentation. Moreover, recent work in Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) has highlighted the importance of learning by progressively increasing the difficulty of a learning task [26]. When learning a network from scratch, the information propagated within the network during the earlier stages of training can contain distortion artifacts due to noise which can be detremental to training. In this paper, we propose an elegant curriculum-based scheme that smoothes the feature embedding of a CNN using anti-aliasing or low-pass filters. We propose to augment the training of CNNs by controlling the amount of high frequency information propagated within the CNNs as training progresses, by convolving the output of a CNN feature map of each layer with a Gaussian kernel.