  Applying convolutional neural networks to large images is computationally
expensive because the amount of computation scales linearly with the number of
image pixels. We present a novel recurrent neural network model that is capable
of extracting information from an image or video by adaptively selecting a
sequence of regions or locations and only processing the selected regions at
high resolution. Like convolutional neural networks, the proposed model has a
degree of translation invariance built-in, but the amount of computation it
performs can be controlled independently of the input image size. While the
model is non-differentiable, it can be trained using reinforcement learning
methods to learn task-specific policies. We evaluate our model on several image
classification tasks, where it significantly outperforms a convolutional neural
network baseline on cluttered images, and on a dynamic visual control problem,
where it learns to track a simple object without an explicit training signal
for doing so.
