We introduce a novel scheme to train binary convolutional neural networks (CNNs) -- CNNs with weights and activations constrained to -1,+1 at run-time. It has been known that using binary weights and activations drastically reduce memory size and accesses, and can replace arithmetic operations with more efficient bitwise operations, leading to much faster test-time inference and lower power consumption. However, previous works on binarizing CNNs usually result in severe prediction accuracy degradation. In this paper, we address this issue with two major innovations: (1) approximating full-precision weights with the linear combination of multiple binary weight bases; (2) employing multiple binary activations to alleviate information loss. The implementation of the resulting binary CNN, denoted as ABC-Net, is shown to achieve much closer performance to its full-precision counterpart, and even reach the comparable prediction accuracy on ImageNet and forest trail datasets, given adequate binary weight bases and activations.
Quantized Neural Networks: High precision parameters are not very necessary to reach high performance in deep neural networks. Recent research efforts (e.g., ) have considerably reduced a large amounts of memory requirement and computation complexity by using low bitwidth weights and activations. further generalized these schemes and proposed to train CNNs with low bitwidth gradients. By performing the quantization after network training or using the straight-through estimator (STE)" , these works avoided the issues of non-differentiable optimization. While some of these methods have produced good results on datasets such as CIFAR-10 and SVHN, none has produced low precision networks competitive with full-precision models on large-scale classification tasks, such as ImageNet. In fact, and experiment with different combinations of bitwidth for weights and activations, and show that the performance of their highly quantized networks deteriorates rapidly when the weights and activations are quantized to less than 4-bit numbers. @cite_1 enhance the performance of a low bitwidth model by addressing the gradient mismatch problem, nevertheless there is still much room for improvement.
@cite_1
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The problem of quantizing the activations of a deep neural network is considered. An examination of the popular binary quantization approach shows that this consists of approximating a classical non-linearity, the hyperbolic tangent, by two functions: a piecewise constant sign function, which is used in feedforward network computations, and a piecewise linear hard tanh function, used in the backpropagation step during network learning. The problem of approximating the ReLU non-linearity, widely used in the recent deep learning literature, is then considered. An half-wave Gaussian quantizer (HWGQ) is proposed for forward approximation and shown to have efficient implementation, by exploiting the statistics of of network activations and batch normalization operations commonly used in the literature. To overcome the problem of gradient mismatch, due to the use of different forward and backward approximations, several piece-wise backward approximators are then investigated. The implementation of the resulting quantized network, denoted as HWGQ-Net, is shown to achieve much closer performance to full precision networks, such as AlexNet, ResNet, GoogLeNet and VGG-Net, than previously available low-precision networks, with 1-bit binary weights and 2-bit quantized activations.