Backpropagation. Recall from the backpropagation chapter that the backward pass for a max(x, y) operation has a simple interpretation as only routing the gradient to the input that had the highest value in the forward pass. Hence, during the forward pass of a pooling layer it is common to keep track of the index of the max activation (sometimes also called the switches) so that gradient routing is efficient during backpropagation.
Recent developments.
Fractional Max-Pooling suggests a method for performing the pooling operation with filters smaller than 2x2. This is done by randomly generating pooling regions with a combination of 1x1, 1x2, 2x1 or 2x2 filters to tile the input activation map. The grids are generated randomly on each forward pass, and at test time the predictions can be averaged across several grids.
Striving for Simplicity: The All Convolutional Net proposes to discard the pooling layer in favor of architecture that only consists of repeated CONV layers. To reduce the size of the representation they suggest using larger stride in CONV layer once in a while.
Due to the aggressive reduction in the size of the representation (which is helpful only for smaller datasets to control overfitting), the trend in the literature is towards discarding the pooling layer in modern ConvNets.
Normalization Layer
Many types of normalization layers have been proposed for use in ConvNet architectures, sometimes with the intentions of implementing inhibition schemes observed in the biological brain. However, these layers have recently fallen out of favor because in practice their contribution has been shown to be minimal, if any. For various types of normalizations, see the discussion in Alex Krizhevsky's cuda-convnet library API.
Fully-connected layer
Neurons in a fully connected layer have full connections to all activations in the previous layer, as seen in regular Neural Networks. Their activations can hence be computed with a matrix multiplication followed by a bias offset. See the Neural Network section of the notes for more information.