中国科学院自动化研究所机构知识库

The deep neural network (DNN) has achieved remarkable performance in a wide range of applications at the cost of huge memory and computational complexity. Fixed-point network quantization emerges as a popular acceleration and compression method but still suffers from huge performance degradation when extremely low-bit quantization is utilized. Moreover, current fixed-point quantization methods rely heavily on supervised retraining using large amounts of the labeled training data, while the labeled data are hard to obtain in the real-world applications. In this article, we propose an efficient framework, namely, fixed-point factorized network (FFN), to turn all weights into ternary values, i.e., {-1, 0, 1}. We highlight that the proposed FFN framework can achieve negligible degradation even without any supervised retraining on the labeled data. Note that the activations can be easily quantized into an 8-bit format; thus, the resulting networks only have low-bit fixed-point additions that are significantly more efficient than 32-bit floating-point multiply-accumulate operations (MACs). Extensive experiments on large-scale ImageNet classification and object detection on MS COCO show that the proposed FFN can achieve about more than 20x compression and remove most of the multiply operations with comparable accuracy. Codes are available on GitHub at https://github.com/wps712/FFN.