63 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
EAST: An Efficient and Accurate Scene Text Detector
Previous approaches for scene text detection have already achieved promising
performances across various benchmarks. However, they usually fall short when
dealing with challenging scenarios, even when equipped with deep neural network
models, because the overall performance is determined by the interplay of
multiple stages and components in the pipelines. In this work, we propose a
simple yet powerful pipeline that yields fast and accurate text detection in
natural scenes. The pipeline directly predicts words or text lines of arbitrary
orientations and quadrilateral shapes in full images, eliminating unnecessary
intermediate steps (e.g., candidate aggregation and word partitioning), with a
single neural network. The simplicity of our pipeline allows concentrating
efforts on designing loss functions and neural network architecture.
Experiments on standard datasets including ICDAR 2015, COCO-Text and MSRA-TD500
demonstrate that the proposed algorithm significantly outperforms
state-of-the-art methods in terms of both accuracy and efficiency. On the ICDAR
2015 dataset, the proposed algorithm achieves an F-score of 0.7820 at 13.2fps
at 720p resolution.Comment: Accepted to CVPR 2017, fix equation (3
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