text: It is widely believed that the success of deep convolutional networks is based on progressively discarding uninformative variability about the input with respect to the problem at hand. This is supported empirically by the difficulty of recovering images from their hidden representations, in most commonly used network architectures. In this paper we show via a one-to-one mapping that this loss of information is not a necessary condition to learn representations that generalize well on complicated problems, such as ImageNet. Via a cascade of homeomorphic layers, we build the i-RevNet, a network that can be fully inverted up to the final projection onto the classes, i.e. no information is discarded. Building an invertible architecture is difficult, for one, because the local inversion is ill-conditioned, we overcome this by providing an explicit inverse. An analysis of i-RevNets learned representations suggests an alternative explanation for the success of deep networks by a progressive contraction and linear separation with depth. To shed light on the nature of the model learned by the i-RevNet we reconstruct linear interpolations between natural image representations.
  @cite_7: Deep residual networks (ResNets) have significantly pushed forward the state-of-the-art on image classification, increasing in performance as networks grow both deeper and wider. However, memory consumption becomes a bottleneck, as one needs to store the activations in order to calculate gradients using backpropagation. We present the Reversible Residual Network (RevNet), a variant of ResNets where each layer's activations can be reconstructed exactly from the next layer's. Therefore, the activations for most layers need not be stored in memory during backpropagation. We demonstrate the effectiveness of RevNets on CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, and ImageNet, establishing nearly identical classification accuracy to equally-sized ResNets, even though the activation storage requirements are independent of depth.
summary: Our main inspiration for this work is the recent reversible residual network (RevNet), introduced in @cite_7 . RevNets are in turn closely related to NICE and Real-NVP architectures , which make use of constrained Jacobian determinants for generative modeling. All these architectures are similar to the lifting scheme and Feistel cipher diagrams , as we will show. RevNets illustrate how to build invertible ResNet-type blocks that avoid storing intermediate activations necessary for the backward pass. However, RevNets still employ multiple non-invertible operators like max-pooling and downsampling operators as part of the network. As such, RevNets are not invertible by construction. In this paper, we show how to build an invertible type of RevNet architecture that performs competitively with RevNets on Imagenet, which we call @math -RevNet for invertible RevNet.