Learning Rich Image Representation with Deep Layer Aggregation

Architectural efforts are exploring many dimensions for network backbones, designing deeper or wider architectures, but how to best aggregate layers and blocks across a network deserves further attention. We augment standard architectures with deeper aggregation to better fuse information across layers. Our deep layer aggregation structures iteratively and hierarchically merge the feature hierarchy to make networks with better accuracy and fewer parameters. Experiments across architectures and tasks show that deep layer aggregation improves recognition and resolution compared to existing branching and merging schemes.