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。

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）。

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.

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。

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.

深度学习技术在各种任务中都表现出了出色的有效性，并且深度学习具有推进多种应用程序（包括在边缘计算中）的潜力，其中将深层模型部署在边缘设备上，以实现即时的数据处理和响应。一个关键的挑战是，虽然深层模型的应用通常会产生大量的内存和计算成本，但Edge设备通常只提供非常有限的存储和计算功能，这些功能可能会在各个设备之间差异很大。这些特征使得难以构建深度学习解决方案，以释放边缘设备的潜力，同时遵守其约束。应对这一挑战的一种有希望的方法是自动化有效的深度学习模型的设计，这些模型轻巧，仅需少量存储，并且仅产生低计算开销。该调查提供了针对边缘计算的深度学习模型设计自动化技术的全面覆盖。它提供了关键指标的概述和比较，这些指标通常用于量化模型在有效性，轻度和计算成本方面的水平。然后，该调查涵盖了深层设计自动化技术的三类最新技术：自动化神经体系结构搜索，自动化模型压缩以及联合自动化设计和压缩。最后，调查涵盖了未来研究的开放问题和方向。

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。

模型量化已成为加速深度学习推理的不可或缺的技术。虽然研究人员继续推动量化算法的前沿，但是现有量化工作通常是不可否认的和不可推销的。这是因为研究人员不选择一致的训练管道并忽略硬件部署的要求。在这项工作中，我们提出了模型量化基准（MQBench），首次尝试评估，分析和基准模型量化算法的再现性和部署性。我们为实际部署选择多个不同的平台，包括CPU，GPU，ASIC，DSP，并在统一培训管道下评估广泛的最新量化算法。 MQBENCK就像一个连接算法和硬件的桥梁。我们进行全面的分析，并找到相当大的直观或反向直观的见解。通过对齐训练设置，我们发现现有的算法在传统的学术轨道上具有大致相同的性能。虽然用于硬件可部署量化，但有一个巨大的精度差距，仍然不稳定。令人惊讶的是，没有现有的算法在MQBench中赢得每一项挑战，我们希望这项工作能够激发未来的研究方向。

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。

量化的神经网络通常需要较小的内存占用和较低的计算复杂性，这对于有效部署至关重要。然而，量化不可避免地导致原始网络的分布分发，这通常会降低性能。为了解决这个问题，已经制定了大规模的努力，但大多数现有方法缺乏统计因素，依赖于几种手动配置。在本文中，我们提出了一种自适应映射量化方法，以学习模型内固有的最佳潜在子分布，并用混凝土高斯混合物（GM）平稳地近似。特别地，网络权重被符合GM - 近似的子分布。该子分布随着直接任务客观优化引导的共同调整模式中的重量更新而发展。在各种现代架构上的图像分类和物体检测的充分实验证明了所提出的方法的有效性，泛化性能和可转移性。此外，开发了用于移动CPU的有效部署流，在Octa-Core ARM CPU上实现高达7.46 $ \ Times $推理加速。代码在https://github.com/runpeidong/dgms公开发布。

Most of the existing works use projection functions for ternary quantization in discrete space. Scaling factors and thresholds are used in some cases to improve the model accuracy. However, the gradients used for optimization are inaccurate and result in a notable accuracy gap between the full precision and ternary models. To get more accurate gradients, some works gradually increase the discrete portion of the full precision weights in the forward propagation pass, e.g., using temperature-based Sigmoid function. Instead of directly performing ternary quantization in discrete space, we push full precision weights close to ternary ones through regularization term prior to ternary quantization. In addition, inspired by the temperature-based method, we introduce a re-scaling factor to obtain more accurate gradients by simulating the derivatives of Sigmoid function. The experimental results show that our method can significantly improve the accuracy of ternary quantization in both image classification and object detection tasks.

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.

由于存储器和计算资源有限，部署在移动设备上的卷积神经网络（CNNS）是困难的。我们的目标是通过利用特征图中的冗余来设计包括CPU和GPU的异构设备的高效神经网络，这很少在神经结构设计中进行了研究。对于类似CPU的设备，我们提出了一种新颖的CPU高效的Ghost（C-Ghost）模块，以生成从廉价操作的更多特征映射。基于一组内在的特征映射，我们使用廉价的成本应用一系列线性变换，以生成许多幽灵特征图，可以完全揭示内在特征的信息。所提出的C-Ghost模块可以作为即插即用组件，以升级现有的卷积神经网络。 C-Ghost瓶颈旨在堆叠C-Ghost模块，然后可以轻松建立轻量级的C-Ghostnet。我们进一步考虑GPU设备的有效网络。在建筑阶段的情况下，不涉及太多的GPU效率（例如，深度明智的卷积），我们建议利用阶段明智的特征冗余来制定GPU高效的幽灵（G-GHOST）阶段结构。舞台中的特征被分成两个部分，其中使用具有较少输出通道的原始块处理第一部分，用于生成内在特征，另一个通过利用阶段明智的冗余来生成廉价的操作。在基准测试上进行的实验证明了所提出的C-Ghost模块和G-Ghost阶段的有效性。 C-Ghostnet和G-Ghostnet分别可以分别实现CPU和GPU的准确性和延迟的最佳权衡。代码可在https://github.com/huawei-noah/cv-backbones获得。

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。

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

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。

Mixed-precision quantization has been widely applied on deep neural networks (DNNs) as it leads to significantly better efficiency-accuracy tradeoffs compared to uniform quantization. Meanwhile, determining the exact precision of each layer remains challenging. Previous attempts on bit-level regularization and pruning-based dynamic precision adjustment during training suffer from noisy gradients and unstable convergence. In this work, we propose Continuous Sparsification Quantization (CSQ), a bit-level training method to search for mixed-precision quantization schemes with improved stability. CSQ stabilizes the bit-level mixed-precision training process with a bi-level gradual continuous sparsification on both the bit values of the quantized weights and the bit selection in determining the quantization precision of each layer. The continuous sparsification scheme enables fully-differentiable training without gradient approximation while achieving an exact quantized model in the end.A budget-aware regularization of total model size enables the dynamic growth and pruning of each layer's precision towards a mixed-precision quantization scheme of the desired size. Extensive experiments show CSQ achieves better efficiency-accuracy tradeoff than previous methods on multiple models and datasets.

为了弥合深度神经网络的复杂性和硬件能力之间不断增加的差距，网络量化引起了越来越多的研究关注。混合精度量化的最新趋势利用硬件的多个位宽度算术运算来释放网络量化的全部潜力。然而，这也导致困难的整数编程配方，并且即使使用各种放松，大多数现有方法也能使用极其耗时的搜索过程。我们建议优化一个代理度量，而不是解决原始整数编程的问题，而是与整数编程的丢失高度相关的网络正交性的概念，而是用线性编程易于优化。该方法通过数量级的秩序减少了搜索时间和所需的数据量，符合量化精度几乎没有妥协。具体而言，我们在Reset-18上获得72.08％的前1个精度，6.7MB不需要任何搜索迭代。鉴于我们的算法的高效率和低数据依赖性，我们将其用于训练后量化，该量化仅在MobileNetv2上实现71.27％的前1个精度，只有1.5MB。我们的代码可在https://github.com/mac-automl/oppq上获得。

Model quantization is a widely used technique to compress and accelerate deep neural network (DNN) inference. Emergent DNN hardware accelerators begin to support mixed precision (1-8 bits) to further improve the computation efficiency, which raises a great challenge to find the optimal bitwidth for each layer: it requires domain experts to explore the vast design space trading off among accuracy, latency, energy, and model size, which is both timeconsuming and sub-optimal. There are plenty of specialized hardware for neural networks, but little research has been done for specialized neural network optimization for a particular hardware architecture. Conventional quantization algorithm ignores the different hardware architectures and quantizes all the layers in a uniform way. In this paper, we introduce the Hardware-Aware Automated Quantization (HAQ) framework which leverages the reinforcement learning to automatically determine the quantization policy, and we take the hardware accelerator's feedback in the design loop. Rather than relying on proxy signals such as FLOPs and model size, we employ a hardware simulator to generate direct feedback signals (latency and energy) to the RL agent. Compared with conventional methods, our framework is fully automated and can specialize the quantization policy for different neural network architectures and hardware architectures. Our framework effectively reduced the latency by 1.4-1.95× and the energy consumption by 1.9× with negligible loss of accuracy compared with the fixed bitwidth (8 bits) quantization. Our framework reveals that the optimal policies on different hardware architectures (i.e., edge and cloud architectures) under different resource constraints (i.e., latency, energy and model size) are drastically different. We interpreted the implication of different quantization policies, which offer insights for both neural network architecture design and hardware architecture design. * indicates equal contributions. 68 69 70 71 72 73 25 44 63 82 101 120 MobileNets (fixed 8-bit quantization) MobileNets (our flexible-bit quantization) Latency (ms) Top-1 Accuracy (%) 1MB 2MB 3MB Model Size:Figure 1: We need mixed precision for different layers. We quantize MobileNets [12] to different number of bits (both weights and activations), and it lies on a better pareto curve (yellow) than fixed bit quantization (blue). The reason is that different layers have different redundancy and have different arithmetic intensity (OPs/byte) on the hardware, which advocates for using mixed precision for different layers.