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Bayesian Compression for Deep Learning (arxiv.org)
3 points by Katydid on May 30, 2017 | hide | past | pdf | discuss on HN

In plain words: A probability-based trick shrinks a neural network by dropping whole nodes and using each weight's uncertainty to choose how many bits to store it in. It packs networks smaller than usual weight-by-weight pruning, while staying close to methods designed for speed or energy.

Abstract

Compression and computational efficiency in deep learning have become a problem of great significance. In this work, we argue that the most principled and effective way to attack this problem is by adopting a Bayesian point of view, where through sparsity inducing priors we prune large parts of the network. We introduce two novelties in this paper: 1) we use hierarchical priors to prune nodes instead of individual weights, and 2) we use the posterior uncertainties to determine the optimal fixed point precision to encode the weights. Both factors significantly contribute to achieving the state of the art in terms of compression rates, while still staying competitive with methods designed to optimize for speed or energy efficiency.

Christos Louizos, Karen Ullrich, Max Welling
arXiv:1705.08665 · stat.ML, cs.LG · submitted May 24, 2017 · updated Nov 6, 2017
abstract · pdf · html · Published as a conference paper at NIPS 2017

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