Investigating Neural Architectures by Synthetic Dataset Design

Recent years have seen the emergence of many new neural network structures (architectures and layers). To solve a given task, a network requires a certain set of abilities reflected in its structure. The required abilities depend on each task. There is so far no systematic study of the real capacities of the proposed neural structures. The question of what each structure can and cannot achieve is only partially answered by its performance on common benchmarks. Indeed, natural data contain complex unknown statistical cues. It is therefore impossible to know what cues a given neural structure is taking advantage of in such data. In this work, we sketch a methodology to measure the effect of each structure on a network’s ability, by designing ad hoc synthetic datasets. Each dataset is tailored to assess a given ability and is reduced to its simplest form: each input contains exactly the amount of information needed to solve the task. We illustrate our methodology by building three datasets to evaluate each of the three following network properties: a) the ability to link local cues to distant inferences, b) the translation covariance and c) the ability to group pixels with the same characteristics and share information among them. Using a first simplified depth estimation dataset, we pinpoint a serious nonlocal deficit of the U-Net. We then evaluate how to resolve this limitation by embedding its structure with nonlocal layers, which allow computing complex features with long-range dependencies. Using a second dataset, we compare different positional encoding methods and use the results to further improve the U-Net on the depth estimation task. The third introduced dataset serves to demonstrate the need for self-attention-like mechanisms for resolving more realistic depth estimation tasks.