Band-limited Training and Inference for Convolutional Neural Networks

The convolutional layers are core building blocks of neural network architecture. In general, a convolutional filter applies to the entire frequency spectrum of an input signal. We explore artificially constraining the frequency spectra of these filters, called band-limiting, during Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) training. The band-limiting applies to both the feedforward and backpropagation steps. Through an extensive evaluation over time-series and image datasets, we observe that CNNs are resilient to this compression scheme and results suggest that CNNs learn to leverage lower-frequency components. An extensive experimental evaluation across 1D and 2D CNN training tasks illustrates: (1) band-limited training can effectively control the resource usage (GPU and memory); (2) models trained with band-limited layers retain high prediction accuracy; and (3) requires no modification to existing training algorithms or neural network architecture to use unlike other compression schemes.