Thursday, August 24, 2017

Towards a Deeper Understanding of Training Quantized Neural Networks / BitNet: Bit-Regularized Deep Neural Networks / Deep Binary Reconstruction for Cross-modal Hashing

There is a strong interest in the low bit side of the Force !




Towards a Deeper Understanding of Training Quantized Neural Networks by Hao Li, Soham De,  Zheng Xu, Christoph Studer, Hanan Samet, Tom Goldstein
Training neural networks with coarsely quantized weights is a key step towards learning on embedded platforms that have limited computing resources, memory capacity, and power consumption. Numerous recent publications have studied methods for training quantized networks, but these studies have been purely experimental. In this work, we investigate the theory of training quantized neural networks by analyzing the convergence properties of some commonly used methods. Our main result shows that training algorithms that exploit high-precision representations have an important annealing property that purely quantized training methods lack, which explains many of the observed empirical differences between these types of algorithms. 

We present a novel regularization scheme for training deep neural networks. The parameters of neural networks are usually unconstrained and have a dynamic range dispersed over the real line. Our key idea is to control the expressive power of the network by dynamically quantizing the range and set of values that the parameters can take. We formulate this idea using a novel end-to-end approach that regularizes the traditional classification loss function. Our regularizer is inspired by the Minimum Description Length principle. For each layer of the network, our approach optimizes a translation and scaling factor along with integer-valued parameters. We empirically compare BitNet to an equivalent unregularized model on the MNIST and CIFAR-10 datasets. We show that BitNet converges faster to a superior quality solution. Additionally, the resulting model is significantly smaller in size due to the use of integer parameters instead of floats.


With the increasing demand of massive multimodal data storage and organization, cross-modal retrieval based on hashing technique has drawn much attention nowadays. It takes the binary codes of one modality as the query to retrieve the relevant hashing codes of another modality. However, the existing binary constraint makes it difficult to find the optimal cross-modal hashing function. Most approaches choose to relax the constraint and perform thresholding strategy on the real-value representation instead of directly solving the original objective. In this paper, we first provide a concrete analysis about the effectiveness of multimodal networks in preserving the inter- and intra-modal consistency. Based on the analysis, we provide a so-called Deep Binary Reconstruction (DBRC) network that can directly learn the binary hashing codes in an unsupervised fashion. The superiority comes from a proposed simple but efficient activation function, named as Adaptive Tanh (ATanh). The ATanh function can adaptively learn the binary codes and be trained via back-propagation. Extensive experiments on three benchmark datasets demonstrate that DBRC outperforms several state-of-the-art methods in both image2text and text2image retrieval task.

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