  We introduce a framework for designing multi-scale, adaptive, shift-invariant
frames and bi-frames for representing signals. The new framework, called
AdaFrame, improves over dictionary learning-based techniques in terms of
computational efficiency at inference time. It improves classical multi-scale
basis such as wavelet frames in terms of coding efficiency. It provides an
attractive alternative to dictionary learning-based techniques for low level
signal processing tasks, such as compression and denoising, as well as high
level tasks, such as feature extraction for object recognition. Connections
with deep convolutional networks are also discussed. In particular, the
proposed framework reveals a drawback in the commonly used approach for
visualizing the activations of the intermediate layers in convolutional
networks, and suggests a natural alternative.
