Microsoft dominated the Imagenet 2015 contest with a deep neural the network of layers [1]. Congrats to kaiming it & Xiangyu Zhang & shaoqing Ren & Jian Sun on the great results [2]!
Their CNN layers Compute G (F (x) +x), which is essentially a feedforward Long short-term Memory (LSTM) [3] without gates!
Their net is similar to the very deep highway Networks [4] (with hundreds of layers), which, are feedforward Lstms with Forget gates (= gated recurrent units) [5].
The authors mention the vanishing gradient problem, but do not mention my very-a-student Sepp (now Hochreiter R) who identified and analyzed this fundamental deep learning problem in 1991, years before. else anybody [6].
Apart from the above, I liked the paper [1] a lot. LSTM Concepts Keep invading CNN territory [e.g., 7a-e], also through gpu-friendly multi-dimensional LSTMS [8].
References
[1] kaiming He, Xiangyu Zhang, shaoqing Ren, Jian Sun. Deep residual for Image Learning. arxiv:1512.03385
[2] imagenet Large Scale Visual recognition Challenge 2015 (ILSVRC2015): Results
[3] S. Hochreiter, J. Schmidhuber. Long short-term Memory. Neural Computation, 9 (8): 1735-1780, 1997. Based on TR fki-207-95, TUM (1995). Pdf. Led to a lot of follow-up work, and are now heavily used by leading IT companies all on the world.
[4] R. K. Srivastava, K. Greff, J. Schmidhuber. Training Very Deep Networks. NIPS 2015;arxiv:1505.00387.
[5] F. Gers, J. Schmidhuber, F. Cummins. Learning to forget:continual prediction with lstm. Neural Computation, 12 (10): 2451-2471, 2000. Pdf.
[6] S. Hochreiter. Untersuchungen zu dynamischen Neuronalen Netzen. Diploma Thesis, TU Munich, 1991. Advisor:j. Schmidhuber. Overview.
[7a] 2011:first superhuman CNNs
[7b] 2011:first human-competitive CNNs for handwriting
[7c] 2012:first CNN to win segmentation contest
[7d] 2012:first CNN to win contest on object discovery in large images
[7e] Deep Learning. Scholarpedia, 10 (11): 32832, 2015
[8] M. Stollenga, W Byeon, M. Liwicki, J. Schmidhuber. Parallel multi-dimensional lstm, with application to Fast biomedical Image volumetric. NIPS 2015; arxiv:1506.07452.
Source: http://people.idsia.ch/~juergen/microsoft-wins-imagenet-through-feedforward-lstm-without-gates.html