  We propose a novel method called deep convolutional decision jungle (CDJ) and
its learning algorithm for image classification. The CDJ maintains the
structure of standard convolutional neural networks (CNNs), i.e. multiple
layers of multiple response maps fully connected. Each response map-or node-in
both the convolutional and fully-connected layers selectively respond to class
labels s.t. each data sample travels via a specific soft route of those
activated nodes. The proposed method CDJ automatically learns features, whereas
decision forests and jungles require pre-defined feature sets. Compared to
CNNs, the method embeds the benefits of using data-dependent discriminative
functions, which better handles multi-modal/heterogeneous data; further,the
method offers more diverse sparse network responses, which in turn can be used
for cost-effective learning/classification. The network is learnt by combining
conventional softmax and proposed entropy losses in each layer. The entropy
loss,as used in decision tree growing, measures the purity of data activation
according to the class label distribution. The back-propagation rule for the
proposed loss function is derived from stochastic gradient descent (SGD)
optimization of CNNs. We show that our proposed method outperforms
state-of-the-art methods on three public image classification benchmarks and
one face verification dataset. We also demonstrate the use of auxiliary data
labels, when available, which helps our method to learn more discriminative
routing and representations and leads to improved classification.
