English

Structured Sparse Ternary Weight Coding of Deep Neural Networks for Efficient Hardware Implementations

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition 2017-07-13 v1

Abstract

Deep neural networks (DNNs) usually demand a large amount of operations for real-time inference. Especially, fully-connected layers contain a large number of weights, thus they usually need many off-chip memory accesses for inference. We propose a weight compression method for deep neural networks, which allows values of +1 or -1 only at predetermined positions of the weights so that decoding using a table can be conducted easily. For example, the structured sparse (8,2) coding allows at most two non-zero values among eight weights. This method not only enables multiplication-free DNN implementations but also compresses the weight storage by up to x32 compared to floating-point networks. Weight distribution normalization and gradual pruning techniques are applied to mitigate the performance degradation. The experiments are conducted with fully-connected deep neural networks and convolutional neural networks.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1707.03684,
  title  = {Structured Sparse Ternary Weight Coding of Deep Neural Networks for Efficient Hardware Implementations},
  author = {Yoonho Boo and Wonyong Sung},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1707.03684},
  year   = {2017}
}

Comments

This paper is accepted in SIPS 2017

R2 v1 2026-06-22T20:44:41.738Z