Local Relation Layer

A Local Relation Layer is an image feature extractor that is an alternative to a convolution operator. The intuition is that aggregation in convolution is basically a pattern matching process that applies fixed filters, which can be inefficient at modeling visual elements with varying spatial distributions. The local relation layer adaptively determines aggregation weights based on the compositional relationship of local pixel pairs. It is argued that, with this relational approach, it can composite visual elements into higher-level entities in a more efficient manner that benefits semantic inference.