ShuffleNet V2 Block

ShuffleNet V2 Block is an image model block used in the ShuffleNet V2 architecture, where speed is the metric optimized for (instead of indirect ones like FLOPs). It utilizes a simple operator called channel split. At the beginning of each unit, the input of $c$ feature channels are split into two branches with $c - c'$ and $c'$ channels, respectively. Following G3, one branch remains as identity. The other branch consists of three convolutions with the same input and output channels to satisfy G1. The two $1\times1$ convolutions are no longer group-wise, unlike the original ShuffleNet. This is partially to follow G2, and partially because the split operation already produces two groups. After convolution, the two branches are concatenated. So, the number of channels keeps the same (G1). The same “channel shuffle” operation as in ShuffleNet is then used to enable information communication between the two branches.

The motivation behind channel split is that alternative architectures, where pointwise group convolutions and bottleneck structures are used, lead to increased memory access cost. Additionally more network fragmentation with group convolutions reduces parallelism (less friendly for GPU), and the element-wise addition operation, while they have low FLOPs, have high memory access cost. Channel split is an alternative where we can maintain a large number of equally wide channels (equally wide minimizes memory access cost) without having dense convolutions or too many groups.