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Auteurs principaux: Lu, Yiwei, Yu, Yaoliang, Li, Xinlin, Nia, Vahid Partovi
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2024
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Accès en ligne:https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.17710
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author Lu, Yiwei
Yu, Yaoliang
Li, Xinlin
Nia, Vahid Partovi
author_facet Lu, Yiwei
Yu, Yaoliang
Li, Xinlin
Nia, Vahid Partovi
contents In neural network binarization, BinaryConnect (BC) and its variants are considered the standard. These methods apply the sign function in their forward pass and their respective gradients are backpropagated to update the weights. However, the derivative of the sign function is zero whenever defined, which consequently freezes training. Therefore, implementations of BC (e.g., BNN) usually replace the derivative of sign in the backward computation with identity or other approximate gradient alternatives. Although such practice works well empirically, it is largely a heuristic or ''training trick.'' We aim at shedding some light on these training tricks from the optimization perspective. Building from existing theory on ProxConnect (PC, a generalization of BC), we (1) equip PC with different forward-backward quantizers and obtain ProxConnect++ (PC++) that includes existing binarization techniques as special cases; (2) derive a principled way to synthesize forward-backward quantizers with automatic theoretical guarantees; (3) illustrate our theory by proposing an enhanced binarization algorithm BNN++; (4) conduct image classification experiments on CNNs and vision transformers, and empirically verify that BNN++ generally achieves competitive results on binarizing these models.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2402_17710
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Understanding Neural Network Binarization with Forward and Backward Proximal Quantizers
Lu, Yiwei
Yu, Yaoliang
Li, Xinlin
Nia, Vahid Partovi
Machine Learning
In neural network binarization, BinaryConnect (BC) and its variants are considered the standard. These methods apply the sign function in their forward pass and their respective gradients are backpropagated to update the weights. However, the derivative of the sign function is zero whenever defined, which consequently freezes training. Therefore, implementations of BC (e.g., BNN) usually replace the derivative of sign in the backward computation with identity or other approximate gradient alternatives. Although such practice works well empirically, it is largely a heuristic or ''training trick.'' We aim at shedding some light on these training tricks from the optimization perspective. Building from existing theory on ProxConnect (PC, a generalization of BC), we (1) equip PC with different forward-backward quantizers and obtain ProxConnect++ (PC++) that includes existing binarization techniques as special cases; (2) derive a principled way to synthesize forward-backward quantizers with automatic theoretical guarantees; (3) illustrate our theory by proposing an enhanced binarization algorithm BNN++; (4) conduct image classification experiments on CNNs and vision transformers, and empirically verify that BNN++ generally achieves competitive results on binarizing these models.
title Understanding Neural Network Binarization with Forward and Backward Proximal Quantizers
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.17710