Scalable Model Compression by Entropy Penalized Reparameterization
Authors: Deniz Oktay, Johannes Ballé, Saurabh Singh, Abhinav Shrivastava
Keywords: deep learning, model compression, computer vision, information theory
TL;DR: An end-to-end trainable model compression method optimizing accuracy jointly with the expected model size.
Abstract: We describe a simple and general neural network weight compression approach, in which the network parameters (weights and biases) are represented in a “latent” space, amounting to a reparameterization. This space is equipped with a learned probability model, which is used to impose an entropy penalty on the parameter representation during training, and to compress the representation using a simple arithmetic coder after training. Classification accuracy and model compressibility is maximized jointly, with the bitrate–accuracy trade-off specified by a hyperparameter. We evaluate the method on the MNIST, CIFAR-10 and ImageNet classification benchmarks using six distinct model architectures. Our results show that state-of-the-art model compression can be achieved in a scalable and general way without requiring complex procedures such as multi-stage training.