Timezone: »

 
Poster
Divide and Conquer: Leveraging Intermediate Feature Representations for Quantized Training of Neural Networks
Ahmed T. Elthakeb · Prannoy Pilligundla · FatemehSadat Mireshghallah · Alexander Cloninger · Hadi Esmaeilzadeh

Wed Jul 15 08:00 AM -- 08:45 AM & Wed Jul 15 07:00 PM -- 07:45 PM (PDT) @
in Poster Session 22 »

The deep layers of modern neural networks extract a rather rich set of features as an input propagates through the network, this paper sets out to harvest these rich intermediate representations for quantization with minimal accuracy loss while significantly reducing the memory footprint and compute intensity of the DNN. This paper utilizes knowledge distillation through teacher-student paradigm (Hinton et al., 2015) in a novel setting that exploits the feature extraction capability of DNNs for higher accuracy quantization. As such, our algorithm logically divides a pretrained full-precision DNN to multiple sections, each of which exposes intermediate features to train a team of students independently in the quantized domain and simply stitching them afterwards. This divide and conquer strategy, makes the training of each student section possible in isolation, speeding up training by enabling parallelization. Experiments on various DNNs (AlexNet, LeNet, MobileNet, ResNet-18, ResNet-20, SVHN and VGG-11) show that, this approach—called DCQ (Divide and Conquer Quantization)—on average, improves the performance of a state-of-the-art quantized training technique, DoReFa-Net (Zhou et al., 2016) by 21.6% and 9.3% for binary and ternary quantization, respectively. Additionally, we show that incorporating DCQ to existing quantized training methods leads to improved accuracies as compared to previously reported by multiple state-of-the-art quantized training methods.

Keywords: Hardware and Systems · Other · Applications - Other

Author Information

Ahmed T. Elthakeb (University of California, San Diego)
Prannoy Pilligundla (University of California, San Diego)
FatemehSadat Mireshghallah (University of California San Diego)
Alexander Cloninger (University of California San Diego)
Hadi Esmaeilzadeh (University of California, San Diego)

More from the Same Authors