DeepFusion: Deep Ensembles for Domain Independent System Fusion

While ensemble systems and late fusion mechanisms have proven their effectiveness by achieving state-of-the-art results in various computer vision tasks, current approaches are not exploiting the power of deep neural networks as their primary ensembling algorithm, but only as inducers, i.e., systems that are used as inputs for the primary ensembling algorithm. In this paper, we propose several deep neural network architectures as ensembling algorithms with various network configurations that use dense and attention layers, an input pre-processing algorithm, and a new type of deep neural network layer denoted the Cross-Space-Fusion layer, that further improves the overall results. Experimental validation is carried out on several data sets from various domains (emotional content classification, medical data captioning) and under various evaluation conditions (two-class regression, binary classification, and multi-label classification), proving the efficiency of DeepFusion.