What does "Dynamic Routing" mean?

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Dynamic routing is a method used in certain kinds of neural networks, particularly in capsule networks. The goal of dynamic routing is to ensure that the information from lower-level features is passed to higher-level features in a way that makes sense and retains important relationships.

In simpler terms, think of dynamic routing as a smart way for different layers of a network to communicate. When a network processes an image, it breaks down the image into smaller parts and tries to understand what these parts mean. Dynamic routing helps decide which parts should be connected based on their relevance. This way, the network can focus on the most important information and ignore what is less useful.

However, dynamic routing can be demanding in terms of computation. It often requires multiple steps to reach a final decision on how to connect different features. This can slow down the process and make the network less efficient.

To make dynamic routing more efficient, some designs have introduced methods such as sparse attention routing, which aims to reduce the amount of unnecessary connections. By doing this, networks can work faster and with fewer resources while still being effective in tasks like image classification.