In deep neural networks (DNNs), there are a huge number of weights and multiply-and-accumulate (MAC) operations. Accordingly, it is challenging to apply DNNs on resource-constrained platforms, e.g., mobile phones. Quantization is a method to reduce the size and the computational complexity of DNNs. Existing quantization methods either require hardware overhead to achieve a non-uniform quantization or focus on model-wise and layer-wise uniform quantization, which are not as fine-grained as filter-wise quantization. In this paper, we propose a class-based quantization method to determine the minimum number of quantization bits for each filter or neuron in DNNs individually. In the proposed method, the importance score of each filter or neuron with respect to the number of classes in the dataset is first evaluated. The larger the score is, the more important the filter or neuron is and thus the larger the number of quantization bits should be. Afterwards, a search algorithm is adopted to exploit the different importance of filters and neurons to determine the number of quantization bits of each filter or neuron. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method can maintain the inference accuracy with low bit-width quantization. Given the same number of quantization bits, the proposed method can also achieve a better inference accuracy than the existing methods.

Although considerable progress has been obtained in neural network quantization for efficient inference, existing methods are not scalable to heterogeneous devices as one dedicated model needs to be trained, transmitted, and stored for one specific hardware setting, incurring considerable costs in model training and maintenance. In this paper, we study a new vertical-layered representation of neural network weights for encapsulating all quantized models into a single one. With this representation, we can theoretically achieve any precision network for on-demand service while only needing to train and maintain one model. To this end, we propose a simple once quantization-aware training (QAT) scheme for obtaining high-performance vertical-layered models. Our design incorporates a cascade downsampling mechanism which allows us to obtain multiple quantized networks from one full precision source model by progressively mapping the higher precision weights to their adjacent lower precision counterparts. Then, with networks of different bit-widths from one source model, multi-objective optimization is employed to train the shared source model weights such that they can be updated simultaneously, considering the performance of all networks. By doing this, the shared weights will be optimized to balance the performance of different quantized models, thus making the weights transferable among different bit widths. Experiments show that the proposed vertical-layered representation and developed once QAT scheme are effective in embodying multiple quantized networks into a single one and allow one-time training, and it delivers comparable performance as that of quantized models tailored to any specific bit-width. Code will be available.

Deep neural networks (DNNs) have successfully been applied in many fields in the past decades. However, the increasing number of multiply-and-accumulate (MAC) operations in DNNs prevents their application in resource-constrained and resource-varying platforms, e.g., mobile phones and autonomous vehicles. In such platforms, neural networks need to provide acceptable results quickly and the accuracy of the results should be able to be enhanced dynamically according to the computational resources available in the computing system. To address these challenges, we propose a design framework called SteppingNet. SteppingNet constructs a series of subnets whose accuracy is incrementally enhanced as more MAC operations become available. Therefore, this design allows a trade-off between accuracy and latency. In addition, the larger subnets in SteppingNet are built upon smaller subnets, so that the results of the latter can directly be reused in the former without recomputation. This property allows SteppingNet to decide on-the-fly whether to enhance the inference accuracy by executing further MAC operations. Experimental results demonstrate that SteppingNet provides an effective incremental accuracy improvement and its inference accuracy consistently outperforms the state-of-the-art work under the same limit of computational resources.

Although weight and activation quantization is an effective approach for Deep Neural Network (DNN) compression and has a lot of potentials to increase inference speed leveraging bit-operations, there is still a noticeable gap in terms of prediction accuracy between the quantized model and the full-precision model. To address this gap, we propose to jointly train a quantized, bit-operation-compatible DNN and its associated quantizers, as opposed to using fixed, handcrafted quantization schemes such as uniform or logarithmic quantization. Our method for learning the quantizers applies to both network weights and activations with arbitrary-bit precision, and our quantizers are easy to train. The comprehensive experiments on CIFAR-10 and ImageNet datasets show that our method works consistently well for various network structures such as AlexNet, VGG-Net, GoogLeNet, ResNet, and DenseNet, surpassing previous quantization methods in terms of accuracy by an appreciable margin. Code available at https://github.com/Microsoft/LQ-Nets

用于压缩神经网络的非均匀量化策略通常实现的性能比其对应于对应物，即统一的策略，因为其优越的代表性能力。然而，许多非均匀量化方法在实现不均匀量化的权重/激活时忽略了复杂的投影过程，这在硬件部署中引起了不可忽略的时间和空间开销。在这项研究中，我们提出了非均匀致均匀的量化（N2UQ），一种方法，其能够保持非均匀方法的强表示能力，同时硬件友好且有效地作为模型推理的均匀量化。我们通过学习灵活的等距输入阈值来实现这一目标，以更好地拟合潜在的分布，同时将这些实值输入量化为等距输出电平。要使用可学习的输入阈值训练量化网络，我们将广义直通估计器（G-STE）介绍，用于难以应答的后向衍生计算W.r.t.阈值参数。此外，我们考虑熵保持正则化，以进一步降低重量量化的信息损失。即使在这种不利约束的施加均匀量化的重量和激活的情况下，我们的N2UQ也经历了最先进的非均匀量化方法，在想象中达到了0.7〜1.8％，展示了N2UQ设计的贡献。代码将公开可用。

While machine learning is traditionally a resource intensive task, embedded systems, autonomous navigation, and the vision of the Internet of Things fuel the interest in resource-efficient approaches. These approaches aim for a carefully chosen trade-off between performance and resource consumption in terms of computation and energy. The development of such approaches is among the major challenges in current machine learning research and key to ensure a smooth transition of machine learning technology from a scientific environment with virtually unlimited computing resources into everyday's applications. In this article, we provide an overview of the current state of the art of machine learning techniques facilitating these real-world requirements. In particular, we focus on deep neural networks (DNNs), the predominant machine learning models of the past decade. We give a comprehensive overview of the vast literature that can be mainly split into three non-mutually exclusive categories: (i) quantized neural networks, (ii) network pruning, and (iii) structural efficiency. These techniques can be applied during training or as post-processing, and they are widely used to reduce the computational demands in terms of memory footprint, inference speed, and energy efficiency. We also briefly discuss different concepts of embedded hardware for DNNs and their compatibility with machine learning techniques as well as potential for energy and latency reduction. We substantiate our discussion with experiments on well-known benchmark datasets using compression techniques (quantization, pruning) for a set of resource-constrained embedded systems, such as CPUs, GPUs and FPGAs. The obtained results highlight the difficulty of finding good trade-offs between resource efficiency and predictive performance.

深神经网络（DNN）的庞大计算和记忆成本通常排除了它们在资源约束设备中的使用。将参数和操作量化为较低的位精确，为神经网络推断提供了可观的记忆和能量节省，从而促进了在边缘计算平台上使用DNN。量化DNN的最新努力采用了一系列技术，包括渐进式量化，步进尺寸的适应性和梯度缩放。本文提出了一种针对边缘计算的混合精度卷积神经网络（CNN）的新量化方法。我们的方法在模型准确性和内存足迹上建立了一个新的Pareto前沿，展示了一系列量化模型，可提供低于4.3 MB的权重（WGTS。）和激活（ACTS。）。我们的主要贡献是：（i）用张量学的学习精度，（ii）WGTS的靶向梯度修饰，（i）硬件感知的异质可区分量化。和行为。为了减轻量化错误，以及（iii）多相学习时间表，以解决从更新到学习的量化器和模型参数引起的学习不稳定性。我们证明了我们的技术在Imagenet数据集上的有效性，包括高效网络lite0（例如，WGTS。的4.14MB和ACTS。以67.66％的精度）和MobilenEtV2（例如3.51MB WGTS。 ％ 准确性）。

我们日常生活中的深度学习是普遍存在的，包括自驾车，虚拟助理，社交网络服务，医疗服务，面部识别等，但是深度神经网络在训练和推理期间需要大量计算资源。该机器学习界主要集中在模型级优化（如深度学习模型的架构压缩），而系统社区则专注于实施级别优化。在其间，在算术界中提出了各种算术级优化技术。本文在模型，算术和实施级技术方面提供了关于资源有效的深度学习技术的调查，并确定了三种不同级别技术的资源有效的深度学习技术的研究差距。我们的调查基于我们的资源效率度量定义，阐明了较低级别技术的影响，并探讨了资源有效的深度学习研究的未来趋势。

混合精确的深神经网络达到了硬件部署所需的能源效率和吞吐量，尤其是在资源有限的情况下，而无需牺牲准确性。但是，不容易找到保留精度的最佳每层钻头精度，尤其是在创建巨大搜索空间的大量模型，数据集和量化技术中。为了解决这一困难，最近出现了一系列文献，并且已经提出了一些实现有希望的准确性结果的框架。在本文中，我们首先总结了文献中通常使用的量化技术。然后，我们对混合精液框架进行了彻底的调查，该调查是根据其优化技术进行分类的，例如增强学习和量化技术，例如确定性舍入。此外，讨论了每个框架的优势和缺点，我们在其中呈现并列。我们最终为未来的混合精液框架提供了指南。

这项工作专注于通过使用直接稀疏算法来提高一些卷积神经网络（CNNS）并提高图形处理单元（GPU）的效率。 NVIDIA深神经网络（CUDNN）图书馆是GPU的深度学习（DL）算法的最有效实现。 GPU是深度学习计算最常用的加速器。提高CNN模型效率的最常用技术之一是重量修剪和量化。修剪有两种主要类型：结构和非结构性。首先，可以在许多类型的加速器上更容易地加速，但是通过这种类型，难以实现稀疏度水平和高精度，与第二种类型一样高。在一些深入的CNN模型中，刷新的非结构修剪可以产生高达90％或更多的重量张量，其稀疏性。在本文中，提出了修剪算法，这使得可以在没有精确下降的情况下实现高稀疏水平。在下一阶段，线性和非线性量化适用于进一步的时间和占地面积。本文是一篇关于有效修剪技术的先前发表的论文，并且目前具有高稀疏性的实际模型和降低精度，可以实现比CUDNN图书馆更好的性能。

在当今智能网络物理系统时代，由于它们在复杂的现实世界应用中的最新性能，深度神经网络（DNN）已无处不在。这些网络的高计算复杂性转化为增加的能源消耗，这是在资源受限系统中部署大型DNN的首要障碍。通过培训后量化实现的定点（FP）实现通常用于减少这些网络的能源消耗。但是，FP中的均匀量化间隔将数据结构的位宽度限制为大值，因为需要以足够的分辨率来表示大多数数字并避免较高的量化误差。在本文中，我们利用了关键见解，即（在大多数情况下）DNN的权重和激活主要集中在零接近零，只有少数几个具有较大的幅度。我们提出了Conlocnn，该框架是通过利用来实现节能低精度深度卷积神经网络推断的框架：（1）重量的不均匀量化，以简化复杂的乘法操作的简化； （2）激活值之间的相关性，可以在低成本的情况下以低成本进行部分补偿，而无需任何运行时开销。为了显着从不均匀的量化中受益，我们还提出了一种新颖的数据表示格式，编码低精度二进制签名数字，以压缩重量的位宽度，同时确保直接使用编码的权重来使用新颖的多重和处理 - 积累（MAC）单元设计。

修剪深度神经网络的现有方法专注于去除训练有素的网络的不必要参数，然后微调模型，找到恢复训练模型的初始性能的良好解决方案。与其他作品不同，我们的方法特别注意通过修剪神经元的压缩模型和推理计算时间的解决方案的质量。通过探索Hessian的光谱半径，所提出的算法通过探索Hessian的光谱半径来指示压缩模型的参数，这导致了更好地推广了未经看涨的数据。此外，该方法不适用于预先训练的网络，并同时执行训练和修剪。我们的结果表明，它改善了神经元压缩的最先进的结果。该方法能够在不同神经网络模型上实现具有小精度下降的非常小的网络。

Uniform-precision neural network quantization has gained popularity since it simplifies densely packed arithmetic unit for high computing capability. However, it ignores heterogeneous sensitivity to the impact of quantization errors across the layers, resulting in sub-optimal inference accuracy. This work proposes a novel neural architecture search called neural channel expansion that adjusts the network structure to alleviate accuracy degradation from ultra-low uniform-precision quantization. The proposed method selectively expands channels for the quantization sensitive layers while satisfying hardware constraints (e.g., FLOPs, PARAMs). Based on in-depth analysis and experiments, we demonstrate that the proposed method can adapt several popular networks channels to achieve superior 2-bit quantization accuracy on CIFAR10 and ImageNet. In particular, we achieve the best-to-date Top-1/Top-5 accuracy for 2-bit ResNet50 with smaller FLOPs and the parameter size.

诸如BERT的预先接受的语言模型在各种自然语言处理任务中显示出显着的效果。但是，这些模型通常包含数百万个参数，这可以防止它们在资源受限设备上实际部署。已知知识蒸馏，重量修剪和量化是模型压缩中的主要方向。然而，通过知识蒸馏获得的紧凑型模型即使对于相对小的压缩比也可能遭受显着的精度下降。另一方面，只有少数量化尝试专门用于自然语言处理任务。它们患有小的压缩比或较大的错误率，因为需要对超参数的手动设置，并且不支持微粒子组 - 方向量化。在本文中，我们提出了一种自动混合精密量化框架，设计用于伯特，其可以同时在亚组 - 明智的水平中进行量化和修剪。具体而言，我们所提出的方法利用可微分的神经结构搜索，搜索自动地分配每个子组中的参数的比例和精度，同时捕获冗余参数组。对BERT下游任务的广泛评估揭示了我们所提出的方法通过提供相同的模型尺寸来实现相同的性能。我们还通过将我们的解决方案与Ottherbert等正交方法相结合来展示获得极其轻量级模型的可行性。

模型二进制化是一种压缩神经网络并加速其推理过程的有效方法。但是，1位模型和32位模型之间仍然存在显着的性能差距。实证研究表明，二进制会导致前进和向后传播中的信息损失。我们提出了一个新颖的分布敏感信息保留网络（DIR-NET），该网络通过改善内部传播和引入外部表示，将信息保留在前后传播中。 DIR-NET主要取决于三个技术贡献：（1）最大化二进制（IMB）的信息：最小化信息损失和通过重量平衡和标准化同时同时使用权重/激活的二进制误差； （2）分布敏感的两阶段估计器（DTE）：通过共同考虑更新能力和准确的梯度来通过分配敏感的软近似来保留梯度的信息； （3）代表性二进制 - 意识蒸馏（RBD）：通过提炼完整精确和二元化网络之间的表示来保留表示信息。 DIR-NET从统一信息的角度研究了BNN的前进过程和后退过程，从而提供了对网络二进制机制的新见解。我们的DIR-NET中的三种技术具有多功能性和有效性，可以在各种结构中应用以改善BNN。关于图像分类和客观检测任务的综合实验表明，我们的DIR-NET始终优于主流和紧凑型体系结构（例如Resnet，vgg，vgg，EfficityNet，darts和mobilenet）下最新的二进制方法。此外，我们在现实世界中的资源有限设备上执行DIR-NET，该设备可实现11.1倍的存储空间和5.4倍的速度。

Deep neural networks (DNNs) are currently widely used for many artificial intelligence (AI) applications including computer vision, speech recognition, and robotics. While DNNs deliver state-of-the-art accuracy on many AI tasks, it comes at the cost of high computational complexity. Accordingly, techniques that enable efficient processing of DNNs to improve energy efficiency and throughput without sacrificing application accuracy or increasing hardware cost are critical to the wide deployment of DNNs in AI systems.This article aims to provide a comprehensive tutorial and survey about the recent advances towards the goal of enabling efficient processing of DNNs. Specifically, it will provide an overview of DNNs, discuss various hardware platforms and architectures that support DNNs, and highlight key trends in reducing the computation cost of DNNs either solely via hardware design changes or via joint hardware design and DNN algorithm changes. It will also summarize various development resources that enable researchers and practitioners to quickly get started in this field, and highlight important benchmarking metrics and design considerations that should be used for evaluating the rapidly growing number of DNN hardware designs, optionally including algorithmic co-designs, being proposed in academia and industry.The reader will take away the following concepts from this article: understand the key design considerations for DNNs; be able to evaluate different DNN hardware implementations with benchmarks and comparison metrics; understand the trade-offs between various hardware architectures and platforms; be able to evaluate the utility of various DNN design techniques for efficient processing; and understand recent implementation trends and opportunities.

为了以计算有效的方式部署深层模型，经常使用模型量化方法。此外，由于新的硬件支持混合的位算术操作，最近对混合精度量化（MPQ）的研究开始通过搜索网络中不同层和模块的优化位低宽，从而完全利用表示的能力。但是，先前的研究主要是在使用强化学习，神经体系结构搜索等的昂贵方案中搜索MPQ策略，或者简单地利用部分先验知识来进行位于刻度分配，这可能是有偏见和优势的。在这项工作中，我们提出了一种新颖的随机量化量化（SDQ）方法，该方法可以在更灵活，更全球优化的空间中自动学习MPQ策略，并具有更平滑的梯度近似。特别是，可区分的位宽参数（DBP）被用作相邻位意选择之间随机量化的概率因素。在获取最佳MPQ策略之后，我们将进一步训练网络使用熵感知的bin正则化和知识蒸馏。我们广泛评估了不同硬件（GPU和FPGA）和数据集的多个网络的方法。 SDQ的表现优于所有最先进的混合或单个精度量化，甚至比较低的位置量化，甚至比各种重新网络和Mobilenet家族的全精度对应物更好，这表明了我们方法的有效性和优势。

由于神经网络变得更加强大，因此在现实世界中部署它们的愿望是一个上升的愿望;然而，神经网络的功率和准确性主要是由于它们的深度和复杂性，使得它们难以部署，尤其是在资源受限的设备中。最近出现了神经网络量化，以满足这种需求通过降低网络的精度来降低神经网络的大小和复杂性。具有较小和更简单的网络，可以在目标硬件的约束中运行神经网络。本文调查了在过去十年中开发的许多神经网络量化技术。基于该调查和神经网络量化技术的比较，我们提出了该地区的未来研究方向。

We introduce a method to train Quantized Neural Networks (QNNs) -neural networks with extremely low precision (e.g., 1-bit) weights and activations, at run-time. At traintime the quantized weights and activations are used for computing the parameter gradients. During the forward pass, QNNs drastically reduce memory size and accesses, and replace most arithmetic operations with bit-wise operations. As a result, power consumption is expected to be drastically reduced. We trained QNNs over the MNIST, CIFAR-10, SVHN and ImageNet datasets. The resulting QNNs achieve prediction accuracy comparable to their 32-bit counterparts. For example, our quantized version of AlexNet with 1-bit weights and 2-bit activations achieves 51% top-1 accuracy. Moreover, we quantize the parameter gradients to 6-bits as well which enables gradients computation using only bit-wise operation. Quantized recurrent neural networks were tested over the Penn Treebank dataset, and achieved comparable accuracy as their 32-bit counterparts using only 4-bits. Last but not least, we programmed a binary matrix multiplication GPU kernel with which it is possible to run our MNIST QNN 7 times faster than with an unoptimized GPU kernel, without suffering any loss in classification accuracy. The QNN code is available online.

Adder Neural Network (AdderNet) provides a new way for developing energy-efficient neural networks by replacing the expensive multiplications in convolution with cheaper additions (i.e.l1-norm). To achieve higher hardware efficiency, it is necessary to further study the low-bit quantization of AdderNet. Due to the limitation that the commutative law in multiplication does not hold in l1-norm, the well-established quantization methods on convolutional networks cannot be applied on AdderNets. Thus, the existing AdderNet quantization techniques propose to use only one shared scale to quantize both the weights and activations simultaneously. Admittedly, such an approach can keep the commutative law in the l1-norm quantization process, while the accuracy drop after low-bit quantization cannot be ignored. To this end, we first thoroughly analyze the difference on distributions of weights and activations in AdderNet and then propose a new quantization algorithm by redistributing the weights and the activations. Specifically, the pre-trained full-precision weights in different kernels are clustered into different groups, then the intra-group sharing and inter-group independent scales can be adopted. To further compensate the accuracy drop caused by the distribution difference, we then develop a lossless range clamp scheme for weights and a simple yet effective outliers clamp strategy for activations. Thus, the functionality of full-precision weights and the representation ability of full-precision activations can be fully preserved. The effectiveness of the proposed quantization method for AdderNet is well verified on several benchmarks, e.g., our 4-bit post-training quantized adder ResNet-18 achieves an 66.5% top-1 accuracy on the ImageNet with comparable energy efficiency, which is about 8.5% higher than that of the previous AdderNet quantization methods.