Cube Kernel: A Novel Approach to Enable Local Gradient Flow Across Channels in CNNs

Abstract. Understanding inter-band and cross-channel relationships is essential for human color perception and object recognition. Yet, local gradients in standard convolutions are tied to fixed input–output channel pairs, and thus channels are fused by a dense, fully-coupled weight tensor: each output channel aggregates all input channels in a uniform way at every spatial location. This leads to heavy computation and does not exploit structured sparsity or selective local channel mixing. To overcome this limitation, we introduce Cube Kernel, a novel convolutional operator that introduces structured cross-channel groups into the local gradient. This design strengthens cross-channel feature fusion, improves optimization efficiency, and reduces computational overhead. Extensive building extraction experiments validate its effectiveness: Cube Kernel consistently outperforms standard convolutions and Involution when integrated into UNet, and replacing a single layer in DeepLabV3+, Swin-UNet, or UNet leads to consistent performance gains. Beyond serving as a lightweight plug-in module, Cube Kernel also scales effectively as a fundamental building block. A Cube-enhanced ConvNeXt variant, ConvNeXt-Cube, achieves state-of-the-art performance across all models (0.9095 IoU / 0.9535 F1 on WBD and 0.9133 IoU / 0.9547 F1 on WHU), demonstrating strong stackability and architectural potential. These results highlight a largely overlooked space in CNN design: enhancing cross-channel interaction at the gradient level. Cube Kernel offers a scalable and efficient alternative to deepen networks for channel mixing, laying a foundation for future advancements in convolutional architecture design. The implementation and trained models will be made publicly available upon publication to facilitate reproducibility.