  Convolutional neural networks typically consist of many convolutional layers
followed by one or more fully connected layers. While convolutional layers map
between high-order activation tensors, the fully connected layers operate on
flattened activation vectors. Despite empirical success, this approach has
notable drawbacks. Flattening followed by fully connected layers discards
multilinear structure in the activations and requires many parameters. We
address these problems by incorporating tensor algebraic operations that
preserve multilinear structure at every layer. First, we introduce Tensor
Contraction Layers (TCLs) that reduce the dimensionality of their input while
preserving their multilinear structure using tensor contraction. Next, we
introduce Tensor Regression Layers (TRLs), which express outputs through a
low-rank multilinear mapping from a high-order activation tensor to an output
tensor of arbitrary order. We learn the contraction and regression factors
end-to-end, and produce accurate nets with fewer parameters. Additionally, our
layers regularize networks by imposing low-rank constraints on the activations
(TCL) and regression weights (TRL). Experiments on ImageNet show that, applied
to VGG and ResNet architectures, TCLs and TRLs reduce the number of parameters
compared to fully connected layers by more than 65% while maintaining or
increasing accuracy. In addition to the space savings, our approach's ability
to leverage topological structure can be crucial for structured data such as
MRI. In particular, we demonstrate significant performance improvements over
comparable architectures on three tasks associated with the UK Biobank dataset.
