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Streamlined Deployment for Quantized Neural Networks (arxiv.org)
2 points by Katydid on Sep 19, 2017 | hide | past | pdf | discuss on HN

In plain words: Phone chips can't natively handle the tiny numbers used in compressed neural networks, so this converts every step to whole numbers and works through one bit at a time with basic on/off bit operations. A compressed AlexNet ran 3.5 times faster than a tuned 8-bit version.

Abstract

Running Deep Neural Network (DNN) models on devices with limited computational capability is a challenge due to large compute and memory requirements. Quantized Neural Networks (QNNs) have emerged as a potential solution to this problem, promising to offer most of the DNN accuracy benefits with much lower computational cost. However, harvesting these benefits on existing mobile CPUs is a challenge since operations on highly quantized datatypes are not natively supported in most instruction set architectures (ISAs). In this work, we first describe a streamlining flow to convert all QNN inference operations to integer ones. Afterwards, we provide techniques based on processing one bit position at a time (bit-serial) to show how QNNs can be efficiently deployed using common bitwise operations. We demonstrate the potential of QNNs on mobile CPUs with microbenchmarks and on a quantized AlexNet, which is 3.5x faster than an optimized 8-bit baseline. Our bit-serial matrix multiplication library is available on GitHub at https://git.io/vhshn

Yaman Umuroglu, Magnus Jahre
arXiv:1709.04060 · cs.CV · submitted Sep 12, 2017 · updated May 30, 2018
abstract · pdf · html · Presented at the International Workshop on Highly Efficient Neural Networks Design (HENND) co-located with CASES'17

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