Difference between DepthwiseConv2D and SeparableConv2D

Question

From the document, I know SeparableConv2D is a combination of depthwise and pointwise operation. However, when I call

SeparableConv2D(100, 5, input_shape=(416,416,10) 

# total parameters is 1350

model.add(DepthwiseConv2D(5, input_shape=(416,416,10)))
model.add(Conv2D(100, 1))

# total parameters is 1360

Does it mean SeparableConv2D does not use bias in depthwise phase by default?

Thanks.

Answer 1

Correct, checking the source code (I did this for tf.keras but I suppose it is the same for standalone keras) shows that in SeparableConv2D, the separable convolution works using only filters, no biases, and a single bias vector is added at the end. The second version, on the other hand, has biases for both DepthwiseConv2D and Conv2D.

Given that convolution is a linear operation and you are using no non-linearity inbetween depthwise and 1x1 convolution, I would suppose that having two biases is unnecessary in this case, similar to how you don't use biases in a layer that is followed by batch normalization, for example. As such, the extra 10 parameters wouldn't actually improve the model (nor should they really hurt either).