Related papers: Understanding Straight-Through Estimator in Traini…
Quantized or low-bit neural networks are attractive due to their inference efficiency. However, training deep neural networks with quantized activations involves minimizing a discontinuous and piecewise constant loss function. Such a loss…
Training quantized neural networks requires addressing the non-differentiable and discrete nature of the underlying optimization problem. To tackle this challenge, the straight-through estimator (STE) has become the most widely adopted…
Binarization of neural networks is a dominant paradigm in neural networks compression. The pioneering work BinaryConnect uses Straight Through Estimator (STE) to mimic the gradients of the sign function, but it also causes the crucial…
Quantized neural network training optimizes a discrete, non-differentiable objective. The straight-through estimator (STE) enables backpropagation through surrogate gradients and is widely used. While previous studies have primarily focused…
The Straight-Through Estimator (STE) is the dominant method for training neural networks with discrete variables, enabling gradient-based optimisation by routing gradients through a differentiable surrogate. However, existing STE variants…
The discontinuous operations inherent in quantization and sparsification introduce a long-standing obstacle to backpropagation, particularly in ultra-low precision and sparse regimes. While the community has long viewed quantization as…
Quantization-aware training comes with a fundamental challenge: the derivative of quantization functions such as rounding are zero almost everywhere and nonexistent elsewhere. Various differentiable approximations of quantization functions…
Network quantization aims at reducing bit-widths of weights and/or activations, particularly important for implementing deep neural networks with limited hardware resources. Most methods use the straight-through estimator (STE) to train…
Neural network quantization aims to reduce the bit-widths of weights and activations, making it a critical technique for deploying deep neural networks on resource-constrained hardware. Most Quantization-Aware Training (QAT) methods rely on…
The Straight-Through Estimator (STE) is widely used for back-propagating gradients through the quantization function, but the STE technique lacks a complete theoretical understanding. We propose an alternative methodology called…
Quantization has become a predominant approach for model compression, enabling deployment of large models trained on GPUs onto smaller form-factor devices for inference. Quantization-aware training (QAT) optimizes model parameters with…
This work examines the challenges of training neural networks using vector quantization using straight-through estimation. We find that a primary cause of training instability is the discrepancy between the model embedding and the…
Sparse training is a natural idea to accelerate the training speed of deep neural networks and save the memory usage, especially since large modern neural networks are significantly over-parameterized. However, most of the existing methods…
Despite the achievements of recent binarization methods on reducing the performance degradation of Binary Neural Networks (BNNs), gradient mismatching caused by the Straight-Through-Estimator (STE) still dominates quantized networks. This…
Analog Compute-In-Memory (CIM) architectures promise significant energy efficiency gains for neural network inference, but suffer from complex hardware-induced noise that poses major challenges for deployment. While noise-aware training…
We study the problem of training neural networks with quantized parameters. Learning low-precision quantized parameters by enabling computation of gradients via the Straight-Through Estimator (STE) can be challenging. While the STE enables…
Training quantised neural networks (QNNs) is a non-differentiable optimisation problem since weights and features are output by piecewise constant functions. The standard solution is to apply the straight-through estimator (STE), using…
We propose a new algorithm for training deep neural networks (DNNs) with binary weights. In particular, we first cast the problem of training binary neural networks (BiNNs) as a bilevel optimization instance and subsequently construct…
With the growth of deep neural networks (DNN), the number of DNN parameters has drastically increased. This makes DNN models hard to be deployed on resource-limited embedded systems. To alleviate this problem, dynamic pruning methods have…
The {\it straight-through estimator} (STE) is commonly used to optimize quantized neural networks, yet its contexts of effective performance are still unclear despite empirical successes.To make a step forward in this comprehension, we…