  We propose a novel deep network structure called "Network In Network" (NIN)
to enhance model discriminability for local patches within the receptive field.
The conventional convolutional layer uses linear filters followed by a
nonlinear activation function to scan the input. Instead, we build micro neural
networks with more complex structures to abstract the data within the receptive
field. We instantiate the micro neural network with a multilayer perceptron,
which is a potent function approximator. The feature maps are obtained by
sliding the micro networks over the input in a similar manner as CNN; they are
then fed into the next layer. Deep NIN can be implemented by stacking mutiple
of the above described structure. With enhanced local modeling via the micro
network, we are able to utilize global average pooling over feature maps in the
classification layer, which is easier to interpret and less prone to
overfitting than traditional fully connected layers. We demonstrated the
state-of-the-art classification performances with NIN on CIFAR-10 and
CIFAR-100, and reasonable performances on SVHN and MNIST datasets.
