Image Classification with Hierarchical Multigraph Networks

Graph Convolutional Networks (GCNs) are a class of general models that can learn from graph structured data. Despite being general, GCNs are admittedly inferior to convolutional neural networks (CNNs) when applied to vision tasks, mainly due to the lack of domain knowledge that is hardcoded into CNNs, such as spatially oriented translation invariant filters. However, a great advantage of GCNs is the ability to work on irregular inputs, such as superpixels of images. This could significantly reduce the computational cost of image reasoning tasks. Another key advantage inherent to GCNs is the natural ability to model multirelational data. Building upon these two promising properties, in this work, we show best practices for designing GCNs for image classification; in some cases even outperforming CNNs on the MNIST, CIFAR-10 and PASCAL image datasets.