Weight Normalization based Quantization for Deep Neural Network Compression

With the development of deep neural networks, the size of network models becomes larger and larger. Model compression has become an urgent need for deploying these network models to mobile or embedded devices. Model quantization is a representative model compression technique. Although a lot of quantization methods have been proposed, many of them suffer from a high quantization error caused by a long-tail distribution of network weights. In this paper, we propose a novel quantization method, called weight normalization based quantization (WNQ), for model compression. WNQ adopts weight normalization to avoid the long-tail distribution of network weights and subsequently reduces the quantization error. Experiments on CIFAR-100 and ImageNet show that WNQ can outperform other baselines to achieve state-of-the-art performance.

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title: MobileNets: Efficient Convolutional Neural Networks for Mobile Vision Applications
abstract: We present a class of efficient models called MobileNets for mobile and embedded vision applications. MobileNets are based on a streamlined architecture that uses depth-wise separable convolutions to build light weight deep neural networks. We introduce two simple global hyper-parameters that efficiently trade off between latency and accuracy. These hyper-parameters allow the model builder to choose the right sized model for their application based on the constraints of the problem. We present extensive experiments on resource and accuracy tradeoffs and show strong performance compared to other popular models on ImageNet classification. We then demonstrate the effectiveness of MobileNets across a wide range of applications and use cases including object detection, finegrain classification, face attributes and large scale geo-localization.

title: TBN: Convolutional Neural Network with Ternary Inputs and Binary Weights
abstract: Despite the remarkable success of Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) on generalized visual tasks, high computational and memory costs restrict their comprehensive applications on consumer electronics (e.g., portable or smart wearable devices). Recent advancements in binarized networks have demonstrated progress on reducing computational and memory costs, however, they suffer from significant performance degradation comparing to their full-precision counterparts. Thus, a highly-economical yet effective CNN that is authentically applicable to consumer electronics is at urgent need. In this work, we propose a Ternary-Binary Network (TBN), which provides an efficient approximation to standard CNNs. Based on an accelerated ternary-binary matrix multiplication, TBN replaces the arithmetical operations in standard CNNs with efficient XOR, AND and bitcount operations, and thus provides an optimal tradeoff between memory, efficiency and performance. TBN demonstrates its consistent effectiveness when applied to various CNN architectures (e.g., AlexNet and ResNet) on multiple datasets of different scales, and provides \(\sim \)32\(\times \) memory savings and \(40\times \) faster convolutional operations. Meanwhile, TBN can outperform XNOR-Network by up to 5.5% (top-1 accuracy) on the ImageNet classification task, and up to 4.4% (mAP score) on the PASCAL VOC object detection task.

title: Heterogeneous Bitwidth Binarization in Convolutional Neural Networks
abstract: Recent work has shown that fast, compact low-bitwidth neural networks can be surprisingly accurate. These networks use homogeneous binarization: all parameters in each layer or (more commonly) the whole model have the same low bitwidth (e.g., 2 bits). However, modern hardware allows efficient designs where each arithmetic instruction can have a custom bitwidth, motivating heterogeneous binarization, where every parameter in the network may have a different bitwidth. In this paper, we show that it is feasible and useful to select bitwidths at the parameter granularity during training. For instance a heterogeneously quantized version of modern networks such as AlexNet and MobileNet, with the right mix of 1-, 2- and 3-bit parameters that average to just 1.4 bits can equal the accuracy of homogeneous 2-bit versions of these networks. Further, we provide analyses to show that the heterogeneously binarized systems yield FPGA- and ASIC-based implementations that are correspondingly more efficient in both circuit area and energy efficiency than their homogeneous counterparts.