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Collaborating Authors

 Covell, Michele


Table-Based Neural Units: Fully Quantizing Networks for Multiply-Free Inference

arXiv.org Machine Learning

In this work, we propose to quantize all parts of standard classification networks and replace the activation-weight--multiply step with a simple table-based lookup. This approach results in networks that are free of floating-point operations and free of multiplications, suitable for direct FPGA and ASIC implementations. It also provides us with two simple measures of per-layer and network-wide compactness as well as insight into the distribution characteristics of activationoutput and weight values. We run controlled studies across different quantization schemes, both fixed and adaptive and, within the set of adaptive approaches, both parametric and model-free. We implement our approach to quantization with minimal, localized changes to the training process, allowing us to benefit from advances in training continuous-valued network architectures. We apply our approach successfully to AlexNet, ResNet, and MobileNet. We show results that are within 1.6% of the reported, non-quantized performance on MobileNet using only 40 entries in our table. This performance gap narrows to zero when we allow tables with 320 entries. Our results give the best accuracies among multiply-free networks.


No Multiplication? No Floating Point? No Problem! Training Networks for Efficient Inference

arXiv.org Machine Learning

A different body of research has focused on quantizing and clustering network weights (Yi et al., 2008; Courbariaux et al., 2016; Rastegari et al., 2016; Deng et al., 2017; Wu et al., 2018). For successful deployment of deep neural networks on highly resource constrained devices (hearing aids, earbuds, wearables), we must simplify the types of operations and the memory/power resources required during inference. Completely avoiding inference-time floating point operations is one of the simplest ways to design networks for these highly constrained environments. By quantizing both our in-network non-linearities and our network weights, we can move to simple, compact networks without floating point operations, without multiplications, and without nonlinear function computations. Our approach allows us to explore the spectrum of possible networks, ranging from fully continuous versions down to networks with bi-level weights and activations. Our results show that quantization can be done with little or no loss of performance on both regression tasks (auto-encoding) and multi-class classification tasks (ImageNet). The memory needed to deploy our quantized networks is less than one-third of the equivalent architecture that uses floating-point operations. The activations in our networks emit only a small number of predefined, quantized values (typically 32) and all of the network's weight are drawn from a small number of unique values (typically 100-1000) found by employing a novel periodic adaptive clustering step during training. Almost all recent neural-network training algorithms rely on gradient-based learning. This has moved the research field away from using discrete-valued inference, with hard thresholds, to smooth, continuous-valued activation functions (Werbos, 1974; Rumelhart et al., 1986). Unfortunately, this causes inference to be done with floating-point operations, making it difficult to deploy on an increasinglylarge set of low-cost, limited-memory, low-power hardware in both commercial (Lane et al., 2015) and research settings (Bourzac, 2017). Avoiding all floating point operations allows the inference network to realize the power-saving gains available with fixed-point processing (Finnerty & Ratigner, 2017).


FaceSync: A Linear Operator for Measuring Synchronization of Video Facial Images and Audio Tracks

Neural Information Processing Systems

FaceSync is an optimal linear algorithm that finds the degree of synchronization between the audio and image recordings of a human speaker. Using canonical correlation, it finds the best direction to combine all the audio and image data, projecting them onto a single axis. FaceSync uses Pearson's correlation to measure the degree of synchronization between the audio and image data. We derive the optimal linear transform to combine the audio and visual information and describe an implementation that avoids the numerical problems caused by computing the correlation matrices.


FaceSync: A Linear Operator for Measuring Synchronization of Video Facial Images and Audio Tracks

Neural Information Processing Systems

FaceSync is an optimal linear algorithm that finds the degree of synchronization betweenthe audio and image recordings of a human speaker. Using canonical correlation, it finds the best direction to combine allthe audio and image data, projecting them onto a single axis. FaceSync uses Pearson's correlation to measure the degree of synchronization betweenthe audio and image data. We derive the optimal linear transform to combine the audio and visual information and describe an implementation that avoids the numerical problems caused by computing thecorrelation matrices.