# Fuzzy Pooling

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2202.08372 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.08372/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 12 of its 43 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 12 Feb 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 12 of 12)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [Very Deep Convolutional Networks for Large-Scale Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.1556/) (2014)
- [Batch Normalization: Accelerating Deep Network Training by Reducing Internal Covariate Shift](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1502.03167/) (2015)
- [EfficientNet: Rethinking Model Scaling for Convolutional Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.11946/) (2019)
- [Fashion-MNIST: a Novel Image Dataset for Benchmarking Machine Learning Algorithms](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.07747/) (2017)
- [MobileNets: Efficient Convolutional Neural Networks for Mobile Vision Applications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.04861/) (2017)
- [Delving Deep into Rectifiers: Surpassing Human-Level Performance on ImageNet Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1502.01852/) (2015)
- [Xception: Deep Learning with Depthwise Separable Convolutions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.02357/) (2016)
- [Inception-v4, Inception-ResNet and the Impact of Residual Connections on Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1602.07261/) (2016)
- [Stochastic Pooling for Regularization of Deep Convolutional Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1301.3557/) (2013)
- [Fractional Max-Pooling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6071/) (2014)
- [Learnable Pooling Regions for Image Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1301.3516/) (2013)

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [DCNFIS: Deep Convolutional Neuro-Fuzzy Inference System](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.06378/) (2023)
- [Image Classification using Fuzzy Pooling in Convolutional Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.16268/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) are artificial learning systems typically based on two operations: convolution, which implements feature extraction through filtering, and pooling, which implements dimensionality reduction. The impact of pooling in the classification performance of the CNNs has been highlighted in several previous works, and a variety of alternative pooling operators have been proposed. However, only a few of them tackle with the uncertainty that is naturally propagated from the input layer to the feature maps of the hidden layers through convolutions. In this paper we present a novel pooling operation based on (type-1) fuzzy sets to cope with the local imprecision of the feature maps, and we investigate its performance in the context of image classification. Fuzzy pooling is performed by fuzzification, aggregation and defuzzification of feature map neighborhoods. It is used for the construction of a fuzzy pooling layer that can be applied as a drop-in replacement of the current, crisp, pooling layers of CNN architectures. Several experiments using publicly available datasets show that the proposed approach can enhance the classification performance of a CNN. A comparative evaluation shows that it outperforms state-of-the-art pooling approaches.