Abstract:
To facilitate large-scale deployment of convolutional networks, integer-arithmetic-only inference has been demonstrated effective, which not only reduces computational co...Show MoreMetadata
Abstract:
To facilitate large-scale deployment of convolutional networks, integer-arithmetic-only inference has been demonstrated effective, which not only reduces computational cost but also ensures cross-platform consistency. However, previous studies on integer networks usually report a decline in the inference accuracy, given the same number of parameters as floating-point-number (FPN) networks. In this paper, we propose to finetune and quantize a well-trained FPN convolutional network to obtain an integer convolutional network. Our key idea is to adjust the upper bound of a bounded rectified linear unit (ReLU), which replaces the normal ReLU and effectively controls the dynamic range of activations. Based on the tradeoff between learning ability and quantization error of networks, we managed to preserve full accuracy after quantization and obtain efficient integer networks. Our experiments on ResNet for image classification demonstrate that our 8-bit integer networks achieve state-of-the-art performance compared with Google's TensorFlow and NVIDIA's TensorRT. Moreover, we experiment on VDSR for image super-resolution and on VRCNN for compression artifact reduction, both of which serve regression tasks that natively require high inference accuracy. Besides ensuring the equivalent performance as the corresponding FPN networks, our integer networks have only 1/4 memory cost and run 2× faster on GPUs.
Date of Conference: 22-28 May 2021
Date Added to IEEE Xplore: 27 April 2021
Print ISBN:978-1-7281-9201-7
Print ISSN: 2158-1525