Recently, convolutional neural networks (CNN) have demonstrated impressive performance in various computer vision tasks. However, high performance hardware is typically indispensable for the application of CNN models due to the high computation complexity, which prohibits their further extensions. In this paper, we propose an efficient framework, namely Quantized CNN, to simultaneously speed-up the computation and reduce the storage and memory overhead of CNN models. Both filter kernels in convolutional layers and weighting matrices in fully-connected layers are quantized, aiming at minimizing the estimation error of each layer's response. Extensive experiments on the ILSVRC-12 benchmark demonstrate 4 6x speed-up and 15 20x compression with merely one percentage loss of classification accuracy. With our quantized CNN model, even mobile devices can accurately classify images within one second.
There have been a few attempts in accelerating the test-phase computation of convolutional networks, and many are inspired from the low-rank decomposition. @cite_33 presented a series of low-rank decomposition designs for convolutional kernels. Similarly, CP-decomposition was adopted in @cite_5 to transform a convolutional layer into multiple layers with lower complexity. @cite_14 @cite_1 considered the subsequent nonlinear units while learning the low-rank decomposition. @cite_26 applied group-wise pruning to the convolutional tensor to decompose it into the multiplications of thinned dense matrices. Recently, fixed-point based approaches are explored in @cite_37 @cite_21 . By representing the connection weights (or even network activations) with fixed-point numbers, the computation can greatly benefit from hardware acceleration.
@cite_37 @cite_14 @cite_26 @cite_33 @cite_21 @cite_1 @cite_5
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Abstract: We propose a simple two-step approach for speeding up convolution layers within large convolutional neural networks based on tensor decomposition and discriminative fine-tuning. Given a layer, we use non-linear least squares to compute a low-rank CP-decomposition of the 4D convolution kernel tensor into a sum of a small number of rank-one tensors. At the second step, this decomposition is used to replace the original convolutional layer with a sequence of four convolutional layers with small kernels. After such replacement, the entire network is fine-tuned on the training data using standard backpropagation process. We evaluate this approach on two CNNs and show that it is competitive with previous approaches, leading to higher obtained CPU speedups at the cost of lower accuracy drops for the smaller of the two networks. Thus, for the 36-class character classification CNN, our approach obtains a 8.5x CPU speedup of the whole network with only minor accuracy drop (1 from 91 to 90 ). For the standard ImageNet architecture (AlexNet), the approach speeds up the second convolution layer by a factor of 4x at the cost of @math increase of the overall top-5 classification error. We propose a simple two-step approach for speeding up convolution layers within large convolutional neural networks based on tensor decomposition and discriminative fine-tuning. Given a layer, we use non-linear least squares to compute a low-rank CP-decomposition of the 4D convolution kernel tensor into a sum of a small number of rank-one tensors. At the second step, this decomposition is used to replace the original convolutional layer with a sequence of four convolutional layers with small kernels. After such replacement, the entire network is fine-tuned on the training data using standard backpropagation process. We evaluate this approach on two CNNs and show that it is competitive with previous approaches, leading to higher obtained CPU speedups at the cost of lower accuracy drops for the smaller of the two networks. Thus, for the 36-class character classification CNN, our approach obtains a 8.5x CPU speedup of the whole network with only minor accuracy drop (1 from 91 to 90 ). For the standard ImageNet architecture (AlexNet), the approach speeds up the second convolution layer by a factor of 4x at the cost of @math increase of the overall top-5 classification error. Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have achieved remarkable performance in a wide range of computer vision tasks, typically at the cost of massive computational complexity. The low speed of these networks may hinder real-time applications especially when computational resources are limited. In this paper, an efficient and effective approach is proposed to accelerate the test-phase computation of CNNs based on low-rank and group sparse tensor decomposition. Specifically, for each convolutional layer, the kernel tensor is decomposed into the sum of a small number of low multilinear rank tensors. Then we replace the original kernel tensors in all layers with the approximate tensors and fine-tune the whole net with respect to the final classification task using standard backpropagation. Comprehensive experiments on ILSVRC-12 demonstrate significant reduction in computational complexity, at the cost of negligible loss in accuracy. For the widely used VGG-16 model, our approach obtains a 6.6 @math speed-up on PC and 5.91 @math speed-up on mobile device of the whole network with less than 1 increase on top-5 error. In recent years considerable research efforts have been devoted to compression techniques of convolutional neural networks (CNNs). Many works so far have focused on CNN connection pruning methods which produce sparse parameter tensors in convolutional or fully-connected layers. It has been demonstrated in several studies that even simple methods can effectively eliminate connections of a CNN. However, since these methods make parameter tensors just sparser but no smaller, the compression may not transfer directly to acceleration without support from specially designed hardware. In this paper, we propose an iterative approach named Auto-balanced Filter Pruning, where we pre-train the network in an innovative auto-balanced way to transfer the representational capacity of its convolutional layers to a fraction of the filters, prune the redundant ones, then re-train it to restore the accuracy. In this way, a smaller version of the original network is learned and the floating-point operations (FLOPs) are reduced. By applying this method on several common CNNs, we show that a large portion of the filters can be discarded without obvious accuracy drop, leading to significant reduction of computational burdens. Concretely, we reduce the inference cost of LeNet-5 on MNIST, VGG-16 and ResNet-56 on CIFAR-10 by 95.1 , 79.7 and 60.9 , respectively. Copyright © 2018, Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (www.aaai.org). All rights reserved.