Efficient fixed-radius near neighbors for machine learning

Abstract

Deep learning has enabled artificial intelligence systems to move away from manual feature engineering and toward feature learning and better performance. Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have especially demonstrated super-human performance in many vision tasks. One big reason for the success of CNNs is due to the use of parallelizable software and hardware to run these models, making their use computationally practical. This work is focused in the design and implementation of an efficient and parallel fixed-radius near neighbors program (FRNN). FRNN is a core component in a new type of machine learning model, object oriented deep learning (OODL), serving as a replacement for CNNs with goals of invariance, equivariance, interpretability, and computational efficiency that improve upon the abilities of CNNs. This efficient implementation of FRNN is a critical step in making OODL computationally efficient and practical.