Paper:
For inference operations in deep neural networks on end devices, it is desirable to deploy a single pre-trained neural network model, which can dynamically scale across a computation range without comprising accuracy. To achieve this goal, Incomplete Dot Product (IDP) has been proposed to use only a subset of terms in dot products during forward propagation. However, there are some limitations, including noticeable performance degradation in operating regions with low computational costs, and essential performance limitations since IDP uses hand-crafted profile coefficients. In this paper, we extend IDP by proposing new training algorithms involving a single profile, which may be trainable or pre-determined, to significantly improve the overall performance, especially in operating regions with low computational costs. Specifically, we propose the Task-wise Early Stopping and Loss Aggregation (TESLA) algorithm, which is showed in our 3-layer multilayer perceptron on MNIST that outperforms the original IDP by 32% when only 10% of dot products terms are used and achieves 94.7% accuracy on average. By introducing trainable profile coefficients, TESLA further improves the accuracy to 95.5% without specifying coefficients in advance. Besides, TESLA is applied to the VGG-16 model, which achieves 80% accuracy using only 20% of dot product terms on CIFAR-10 and also keeps 60% accuracy using only 30% of dot product terms on CIFAR-100, but the original IDP performs like a random guess in these two datasets at such low computation costs. Finally, we visualize the learned representations at different dot product percentages by class activation map and show that, by applying TESLA, the learned representations can adapt over a wide range of operation regions.

Review:
An approach to adjust inference speed, power consumption or latency by using incomplete dot products McDanel et al. (2017) is investigated.
The approach is based on `profile coefficients’ which are learned for every channel in a convolution layer, or for every column in the fully connected layer. Based on the magnitude of this profile coefficient, which determines the importance of this `filter,’ individual components in a neural net are switched on or off. McDanel et al. (2017) propose to train such an approach in a stage-by-stage manner.
Different from a recently proposed method by McDanel et al. (2017), the authors of this submission argue that the stage-by-stage training doesn’t fully utilize the deep net performance. To address this issue a `loss aggregation’ is proposed which jointly optimizes a deep net when multiple fractions of incomplete products are used.
The method is evaluated on the MNIST and CIFAR-10 datasets and shown to outperform work on incomplete dot products by McDanel et al. (2017) by 32% in the low resource regime.
Summary:
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In summary, I think the paper proposes an interesting approach but more work is necessary to demonstrate the effectiveness of the discussed method. The results are preliminary and should be extended to CIFAR-100 and ImageNet to be convincing. In addition, the writing should be improved as it is often ambiguous. See below for details.
Review:
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1. Experiments are only provided on very small datasets. According to my opinion, this isn’t sufficient to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach. As a reader I wouldn’t want to see results on CIFAR-100 and ImageNet using multiple network architectures, e.g., AlexNet and VGG16.
2. Usage of the incomplete dot product for the fully connected layer and the convolutional layer seems inconsistent. More specifically, while the profile coefficient is applied for every input element in Eq. (1), it’s applied based on output channels in Eq. (2). This seems inconsistent and a comment like `These two approaches, however, are equivalent with negligible difference induced by the first hidden layer’ is more confusing than clarifying.
3. The writing should be improved significantly and statements should be made more precise, e.g., `From now on, x% DP, where \leq x \geq 100, means the x% of terms used in dot products’. While sentences like those can be deciphered, they aren’t that appealing.
4. The loss functions in Eq. (3) should be made more precise. It remains unclear whether the profile coefficients and the weights are trained jointly, separately, incrementally etc.
5. Algorithm 1 and Algorithm 2 call functions that aren’t described/defined.
6. Baseline numbers for training on datasets without incomplete dot products should be provided.