Abstract
We present a novel method for neural network quantization. Our method, named UNIQ, emulates a non-uniform k-quantile quantizer and adapts the model to perform well with quantized weights by injecting noise to the weights at training time. 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. Our non-uniform quantization approach provides a novel alternative to the existing uniform quantization techniques for neural networks. We further propose a novel complexity metric of number of bit operations performed (BOPs), and we show that this metric has a linear relation with logic utilization and power. We suggest evaluating the trade-off of accuracy vs. complexity (BOPs). The proposed method, when evaluated on ResNet18/34/50 and MobileNet on ImageNet, outperforms the prior state of the art both in the low-complexity regime and the high accuracy regime. We demonstrate the practical applicability of this approach, by implementing our non-uniformly quantized CNN on FPGA.
Original language | English |
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Article number | 3444943 |
Journal | ACM Transactions on Computer Systems |
Volume | 37 |
Issue number | 1-4 |
DOIs | |
State | Published - Jun 2021 |
Keywords
- Deep learning
- efficient deep learning
- neural networks
- quantization