Relevant publications
Natan Liss
UNIQ: Uniform noise injection for non-uniform quantization of neural networks
We present a novel method for training a neural network amenable to inference in low-precision arithmetic with quantized weights and activations. The training is performed in full precision with random noise injection emulating quantization noise. In order to circumvent the need to simulate realistic quantization noise distributions, the weight distributions are uniformized by a non-linear transfor- mation, and uniform noise is injected. This procedure emulates a non-uniform k-quantile quantizer at inference time, which adapts to the specific distribution of the quantized parameters. As a by-product of injecting noise to weights, we find that activations can also be quantized to as low as 8-bit with only a minor accuracy degradation. The method achieves state-of-the-art results for training low-precision networks on ImageNet. In particular, we observe no degradation in accuracy for MobileNet and ResNet-18/34/50 on ImageNet with as low as 4-bit quantization of weights. Our solution achieves the state-of-the-art results in accuracy, in the low computational budget regime, compared to similar models.
NICE: noise injection and clamping estimation for neural network quantization
Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) are very popular in many fields including computer vision, speech recognition, natural language processing, to name a few. Though deep learning leads to groundbreaking performance in these domains, the networks used are very demanding computationally and are far from real-time even on a GPU, which is not power efficient and therefore does not suit low power systems such as mobile devices. To overcome this challenge, some solutions have been proposed for quantizing the weights and activations of these networks, which accelerate the runtime significantly. Yet, this acceleration comes at the cost of a larger error. The uniqname method proposed in this work trains quantized neural networks by noise injection and a learned clamping, which improve the accuracy. This leads to state-of-the-art results on various regression and classification tasks, e.g., ImageNet classification with architectures such as ResNet-18/34/50 with low as 3-bit weights and activations. We implement the proposed solution on an FPGA to demonstrate its applicability for low power real-time applications.
Streaming architectures for large-scale quantized neural networks on an FPGA-based dataflow platform
Deep neural networks (DNNs) are used by different applications that are executed on a range of computer architectures, from IoT devices to supercomputers. The footprint of these networks is huge as well as their computational and communication needs. In order to ease the pressure on resources, research indicates that in many cases a low precision representation (1-2 bit per parameter) of weights and other parameters can achieve similar accuracy while requiring less resources. Using quantized values enables the use of FPGAs to run NNs, since FPGAs are well fitted to these primitives; e.g., FPGAs provide efficient support for bitwise operations and can work with arbitrary-precision representation of numbers. This paper presents a new streaming architecture for running QNNs on FPGAs. The proposed architecture scales out better than alternatives, allowing us to take advantage of systems with multiple FPGAs. We also included support for skip connections, that are used in state-of-the art NNs, and shown that our architecture allows to add those connections almost for free. All this allowed us to implement an 18-layer ResNet for 224×224 images classification, achieving 57.5% top-1 accuracy. In addition, we implemented a full-sized quantized AlexNet. In contrast to previous works, we use 2-bit activations instead of 1-bit ones, which improves AlexNet’s top-1 accuracy from 41.8% to 51.03% for the ImageNet classification. Both AlexNet and ResNet can handle 1000-class real-time classification on an FPGA. Our implementation of ResNet-18 consumes 5× less power and is 4× slower for ImageNet, when compared to the same NN on the latest Nvidia GPUs. Smaller NNs, that fit a single FPGA, are running faster then on GPUs on small (32×32) inputs, while consuming up to 20× less energy and power.