Enabling AI at the Edge with XNOR-Networks

In recent years we have seen a growing number of edge devices adopted by consumers, in their homes (e.g., smart cameras and doorbells), in their cars (e.g., driver assisted systems), and even on their persons (e.g., smart watches and rings). Similar growth is reported in industries including aerospace, agriculture, healthcare, transport, and manufacturing. At the same time that devices are getting smaller, Deep Neural Networks (DNN) that power most forms of artificial intelligence are getting larger, requiring more compute power, memory, and bandwidth. This creates a growing disconnect between advances in artificial intelligence and the ability to develop smart devices at the edge. In this paper, we present a novel approach to running state-of-the-art AI algorithms at the edge. We propose two efficient approximations to standard convolutional neural networks: Binary-Weight-Networks (BWN) and XNOR-Networks. In BWN, the filters are approximated with binary values resulting in 32x memory saving. In XNOR-Networks, both the filters and the input to convolutional layers are binary. Our binary networks are simple, accurate, efficient, and work on challenging visual tasks. We evaluate our approach on the ImageNet classification task. The classification accuracy with a BWN version of AlexNet is the same as the full-precision AlexNet.