1,958 research outputs found
Balanced Quantization: An Effective and Efficient Approach to Quantized Neural Networks
Quantized Neural Networks (QNNs), which use low bitwidth numbers for
representing parameters and performing computations, have been proposed to
reduce the computation complexity, storage size and memory usage. In QNNs,
parameters and activations are uniformly quantized, such that the
multiplications and additions can be accelerated by bitwise operations.
However, distributions of parameters in Neural Networks are often imbalanced,
such that the uniform quantization determined from extremal values may under
utilize available bitwidth. In this paper, we propose a novel quantization
method that can ensure the balance of distributions of quantized values. Our
method first recursively partitions the parameters by percentiles into balanced
bins, and then applies uniform quantization. We also introduce computationally
cheaper approximations of percentiles to reduce the computation overhead
introduced. Overall, our method improves the prediction accuracies of QNNs
without introducing extra computation during inference, has negligible impact
on training speed, and is applicable to both Convolutional Neural Networks and
Recurrent Neural Networks. Experiments on standard datasets including ImageNet
and Penn Treebank confirm the effectiveness of our method. On ImageNet, the
top-5 error rate of our 4-bit quantized GoogLeNet model is 12.7\%, which is
superior to the state-of-the-arts of QNNs
Automated Pruning for Deep Neural Network Compression
In this work we present a method to improve the pruning step of the current
state-of-the-art methodology to compress neural networks. The novelty of the
proposed pruning technique is in its differentiability, which allows pruning to
be performed during the backpropagation phase of the network training. This
enables an end-to-end learning and strongly reduces the training time. The
technique is based on a family of differentiable pruning functions and a new
regularizer specifically designed to enforce pruning. The experimental results
show that the joint optimization of both the thresholds and the network weights
permits to reach a higher compression rate, reducing the number of weights of
the pruned network by a further 14% to 33% compared to the current
state-of-the-art. Furthermore, we believe that this is the first study where
the generalization capabilities in transfer learning tasks of the features
extracted by a pruned network are analyzed. To achieve this goal, we show that
the representations learned using the proposed pruning methodology maintain the
same effectiveness and generality of those learned by the corresponding
non-compressed network on a set of different recognition tasks.Comment: 8 pages, 5 figures. Published as a conference paper at ICPR 201
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