Quaternion neural networks

In the recent years, deep learning has become the leading approach to modern artificial intelligence (AI). The important improvement in terms of processing time required for learning AI based models alongside with the growing amount of available data made of deep neural networks (DNN) the strongest solution to solve complex real-world problems. However, a major challenge of artificial neural architectures lies on better considering the high-dimensionality of the data.To alleviate this issue, neural networks (NN) based on complex and hypercomplex algebras have been developped. The natural multidimensionality of the data is elegantly embedded within complex and hypercomplex neurons composing the model. In particular, quaternion neural networks (QNN) have been proposed to deal with up to four dimensional features, based on the quaternion representation of rotations and orientations. Unfortunately, and conversely to complex-valued neural networks that are nowadays known as a strong alternative to real-valued neural networks, QNNs suffer from numerous limitations that are carrefuly addressed in the different parts detailled in this thesis.The thesis consists in three parts that gradually introduce the missing concepts of QNNs, to make them a strong alternative to real-valued NNs. The first part introduces and list previous findings on quaternion numbers and quaternion neural networks to define the context and strong basics for building elaborated QNNs.The second part introduces state-of-the-art quaternion neural networks for a fair comparison with real-valued neural architectures. More precisely, QNNs were limited by their simple architectures that were mostly composed of a single and shallow hidden layer. In this part, we propose to bridge the gap between quaternion and real-valued models by presenting different quaternion architectures. First, basic paradigms such as autoencoders and deep fully-connected neural networks are introduced. Then, more elaborated convolutional and recurrent neural networks are extended to the quaternion domain. Experiments to compare QNNs over equivalents NNs have been conducted on real-world tasks across various domains, including computer vision, spoken language understanding and speech recognition. QNNs increase performances while reducing the needed number of neural parameters compared to real-valued neural networks.Then, QNNs are extended to unconventional settings. In a conventional QNN scenario, input features are manually segmented into three or four components, enabling further quaternion processing. Unfortunately, there is no evidence that such manual segmentation is the representation that suits the most to solve the considered task. Morevover, a manual segmentation drastically reduces the field of application of QNNs to four dimensional use-cases. Therefore the third part introduces a supervised and an unsupervised model to extract meaningful and disantengled quaternion input features, from any real-valued input signal, enabling the use of QNNs regardless of the dimensionality of the considered task. Conducted experiments on speech recognition and document classification show that the proposed approaches outperform traditional quaternion features.