Title
Mixed Precision DNNs: All you need is a good parametrization
Abstract
Efficient deep neural network (DNN) inference on mobile or embedded devices typically involves quantization of the network parameters and activations. In particular, mixed precision networks achieve better performance than networks with homogeneous bitwidth for the same size constraint. Since choosing the optimal bitwidths is not straight forward, training methods, which can learn them, are desirable. Differentiable quantization with straight-through gradients allows to learn the quantizer's parameters using gradient methods. We show that a suited parametrization of the quantizer is the key to achieve a stable training and a good final performance. Specifically, we propose to parametrize the quantizer with the step size and dynamic range. The bitwidth can then be inferred from them. Other parametrizations, which explicitly use the bitwidth, consistently perform worse. We confirm our findings with experiments on CIFAR-10 and ImageNet and we obtain mixed precision DNNs with learned quantization parameters, achieving state-of-the-art performance.
Year
Venue
Keywords
2020
ICLR
Deep Neural Network Compression, Quantization, Straight through gradients
DocType
Citations 
PageRank 
Conference
1
0.35
References 
Authors
15
8
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Stefan Uhlich1357.62
Lukas Mauch2134.97
Fabien Cardinaux327919.00
Kazuki Yoshiyama441.46
Javier Alonso García541.46
Stephen Tiedemann641.46
Thomas Kemp724630.93
Akira Nakamura810.35