ArcText: A Unified Text Approach to Describing Convolutional Neural Network Architectures

The superiority of Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) largely relies on their architectures that are often manually crafted with extensive human expertise. Unfortunately, such kind of domain knowledge is not necessarily owned by each of the users interested. Data mining on existing CNN can discover useful patterns and fundamental sub-comments from their architectures, providing researchers with strong prior knowledge to design proper CNN architectures when they have no expertise in CNNs. There have been various state-of-the-art data mining algorithms at hand, while there is only rare work that has been done for the mining. One of the main reasons is the gap between CNN architectures and data mining algorithms. Specifically, the current CNN architecture descriptions cannot be exactly vectorized to the input of data mining algorithms. In this paper, we propose a unified approach, named ArcText, to describing CNN architectures based on text. Particularly, four different units and an ordering method have been elaborately designed in ArcText, to uniquely describe the same architecture with sufficient information. Also, the resulted description can be exactly converted back to the corresponding CNN architecture. ArcText bridges the gap between CNN architectures and data mining researchers, and has the potentiality to be utilized to wider scenarios.