What is: Involution?

Involution is an atomic operation for deep neural networks that inverts the design principles of convolution. Involution kernels are distinct in the spatial extent but shared across channels. If involution kernels are parameterized as fixed-sized matrices like convolution kernels and updated using the back-propagation algorithm, the learned involution kernels are impeded from transferring between input images with variable resolutions.

The authors argue for two benefits of involution over convolution: (i) involution can summarize the context in a wider spatial arrangement, thus overcome the difficulty of modeling long-range interactions well; (ii) involution can adaptively allocate the weights over different positions, so as to prioritize the most informative visual elements in the spatial domain.