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Recurrent Neural Networks with Limited Numerical Precision (arxiv.org)
2 points by tonybeltramelli on Nov 23, 2016 | hide | past | pdf | discuss on HN

In plain words: They trained recurrent networks whose weights and biases are rounded to just a few values—like −1, 0, 1 or powers of two—so the math needs far less memory and power. Across three tasks, these tiny-number networks matched or beat full-precision ones in accuracy.

Abstract · Recurrent Neural Networks With Limited Numerical Precision

Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs) produce state-of-art performance on many machine learning tasks but their demand on resources in terms of memory and computational power are often high. Therefore, there is a great interest in optimizing the computations performed with these models especially when considering development of specialized low-power hardware for deep networks. One way of reducing the computational needs is to limit the numerical precision of the network weights and biases, and this will be addressed for the case of RNNs. We present results from the use of different stochastic and deterministic reduced precision training methods applied to two major RNN types, which are then tested on three datasets. The results show that the stochastic and deterministic ternarization, pow2- ternarization, and exponential quantization methods gave rise to low-precision RNNs that produce similar and even higher accuracy on certain datasets, therefore providing a path towards training more efficient implementations of RNNs in specialized hardware.

Joachim Ott, Zhouhan Lin, Ying Zhang, Shih-Chii Liu, Yoshua Bengio
arXiv:1611.07065 · cs.NE · submitted Nov 21, 2016 · updated Feb 26, 2017
abstract · pdf · html · NIPS 2016 EMDNN Workshop paper, condensed version of arXiv:1608.06902

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