GmNet: Revisiting Gating Mechanisms From A Frequency View

Abstract

Lightweight neural networks, essential for on-device applications, often suffer from a low-frequency bias due to their constrained capacity and depth. This limits their ability to capture the fine-grained, high-frequency details (e.g., textures, edges) that are crucial for complex computer vision tasks. To address this fundamental limitation, we perform the first systematic analysis of gating mechanisms from a frequency perspective. Inspired by the convolution theorem, we show how the interplay between element-wise multiplication and non-linear activation functions within Gated Linear Units (GLUs) provides a powerful mechanism to selectively amplify high-frequency signals, thereby enriching the model's feature representations. Based on these findings, we introduce the Gating Mechanism Network (GmNet), a simple yet highly effective architecture that incorporates our frequency-aware gating principles into a standard lightweight backbone. The efficacy of our approach is remarkable: without relying on complex training strategies or architectural search, GmNet achieves a new state-of-the-art for efficient models.