What is: DiCE Unit?

A DiCE Unit is an image model block that is built using dimension-wise convolutions and dimension-wise fusion. The dimension-wise convolutions apply light-weight convolutional filtering across each dimension of the input tensor while dimension-wise fusion efficiently combines these dimension-wise representations; allowing the DiCE unit to efficiently encode spatial and channel-wise information contained in the input tensor.

Standard convolutions encode spatial and channel-wise information simultaneously, but they are computationally expensive. To improve the efficiency of standard convolutions, separable convolution are introduced, where spatial and channelwise information are encoded separately using depth-wise and point-wise convolutions, respectively. Though this factorization is effective, it puts a significant computational load on point-wise convolutions and makes them a computational bottleneck.

DiCE Units utilize a dimension-wise convolution to encode depth-wise, width-wise, and height-wise information independently. The dimension-wise convolutions encode local information from different dimensions of the input tensor, but do not capture global information. One approach is a pointwise convolution, but it is computationally expensive, so instead dimension-wise fusion factorizes the point-wise convolution in two steps: (1) local fusion and (2) global fusion.