scholarly journals Direct Quantization for Training Highly Accurate Low Bit-width Deep Neural Networks

Author(s):  
Tuan Hoang ◽  
Thanh-Toan Do ◽  
Tam V. Nguyen ◽  
Ngai-Man Cheung

This paper proposes two novel techniques to train deep convolutional neural networks with low bit-width weights and activations. First, to obtain low bit-width weights, most existing methods obtain the quantized weights by performing quantization on the full-precision network weights. However, this approach would result in some mismatch: the gradient descent updates full-precision weights, but it does not update the quantized weights. To address this issue, we propose a novel method that enables direct updating of quantized weights with learnable quantization levels to minimize the cost function using gradient descent. Second, to obtain low bit-width activations, existing works consider all channels equally. However, the activation quantizers could be biased toward a few channels with high-variance. To address this issue, we propose a method to take into account the quantization errors of individual channels. With this approach, we can learn activation quantizers that minimize the quantization errors in the majority of channels. Experimental results demonstrate that our proposed method achieves state-of-the-art performance on the image classification task, using AlexNet, ResNet and MobileNetV2 architectures on CIFAR-100 and ImageNet datasets.

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bin Wang ◽  
Y Sun ◽  
Bing Xue ◽  
Mengjie Zhang

© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2018. Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) have demonstrated their superiority in image classification, and evolutionary computation (EC) methods have recently been surging to automatically design the architectures of CNNs to save the tedious work of manually designing CNNs. In this paper, a new hybrid differential evolution (DE) algorithm with a newly added crossover operator is proposed to evolve the architectures of CNNs of any lengths, which is named DECNN. There are three new ideas in the proposed DECNN method. Firstly, an existing effective encoding scheme is refined to cater for variable-length CNN architectures; Secondly, the new mutation and crossover operators are developed for variable-length DE to optimise the hyperparameters of CNNs; Finally, the new second crossover is introduced to evolve the depth of the CNN architectures. The proposed algorithm is tested on six widely-used benchmark datasets and the results are compared to 12 state-of-the-art methods, which shows the proposed method is vigorously competitive to the state-of-the-art algorithms. Furthermore, the proposed method is also compared with a method using particle swarm optimisation with a similar encoding strategy named IPPSO, and the proposed DECNN outperforms IPPSO in terms of the accuracy.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bin Wang ◽  
Y Sun ◽  
Bing Xue ◽  
Mengjie Zhang

© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2018. Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) have demonstrated their superiority in image classification, and evolutionary computation (EC) methods have recently been surging to automatically design the architectures of CNNs to save the tedious work of manually designing CNNs. In this paper, a new hybrid differential evolution (DE) algorithm with a newly added crossover operator is proposed to evolve the architectures of CNNs of any lengths, which is named DECNN. There are three new ideas in the proposed DECNN method. Firstly, an existing effective encoding scheme is refined to cater for variable-length CNN architectures; Secondly, the new mutation and crossover operators are developed for variable-length DE to optimise the hyperparameters of CNNs; Finally, the new second crossover is introduced to evolve the depth of the CNN architectures. The proposed algorithm is tested on six widely-used benchmark datasets and the results are compared to 12 state-of-the-art methods, which shows the proposed method is vigorously competitive to the state-of-the-art algorithms. Furthermore, the proposed method is also compared with a method using particle swarm optimisation with a similar encoding strategy named IPPSO, and the proposed DECNN outperforms IPPSO in terms of the accuracy.


2020 ◽  
Vol 2020 (10) ◽  
pp. 28-1-28-7 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kazuki Endo ◽  
Masayuki Tanaka ◽  
Masatoshi Okutomi

Classification of degraded images is very important in practice because images are usually degraded by compression, noise, blurring, etc. Nevertheless, most of the research in image classification only focuses on clean images without any degradation. Some papers have already proposed deep convolutional neural networks composed of an image restoration network and a classification network to classify degraded images. This paper proposes an alternative approach in which we use a degraded image and an additional degradation parameter for classification. The proposed classification network has two inputs which are the degraded image and the degradation parameter. The estimation network of degradation parameters is also incorporated if degradation parameters of degraded images are unknown. The experimental results showed that the proposed method outperforms a straightforward approach where the classification network is trained with degraded images only.


Mathematics ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 9 (6) ◽  
pp. 624
Author(s):  
Stefan Rohrmanstorfer ◽  
Mikhail Komarov ◽  
Felix Mödritscher

With the always increasing amount of image data, it has become a necessity to automatically look for and process information in these images. As fashion is captured in images, the fashion sector provides the perfect foundation to be supported by the integration of a service or application that is built on an image classification model. In this article, the state of the art for image classification is analyzed and discussed. Based on the elaborated knowledge, four different approaches will be implemented to successfully extract features out of fashion data. For this purpose, a human-worn fashion dataset with 2567 images was created, but it was significantly enlarged by the performed image operations. The results show that convolutional neural networks are the undisputed standard for classifying images, and that TensorFlow is the best library to build them. Moreover, through the introduction of dropout layers, data augmentation and transfer learning, model overfitting was successfully prevented, and it was possible to incrementally improve the validation accuracy of the created dataset from an initial 69% to a final validation accuracy of 84%. More distinct apparel like trousers, shoes and hats were better classified than other upper body clothes.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
B Wang ◽  
Y Sun ◽  
Bing Xue ◽  
Mengjie Zhang

© 2019, Springer Nature Switzerland AG. Image classification is a difficult machine learning task, where Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) have been applied for over 20 years in order to solve the problem. In recent years, instead of the traditional way of only connecting the current layer with its next layer, shortcut connections have been proposed to connect the current layer with its forward layers apart from its next layer, which has been proved to be able to facilitate the training process of deep CNNs. However, there are various ways to build the shortcut connections, it is hard to manually design the best shortcut connections when solving a particular problem, especially given the design of the network architecture is already very challenging. In this paper, a hybrid evolutionary computation (EC) method is proposed to automatically evolve both the architecture of deep CNNs and the shortcut connections. Three major contributions of this work are: Firstly, a new encoding strategy is proposed to encode a CNN, where the architecture and the shortcut connections are encoded separately; Secondly, a hybrid two-level EC method, which combines particle swarm optimisation and genetic algorithms, is developed to search for the optimal CNNs; Lastly, an adjustable learning rate is introduced for the fitness evaluations, which provides a better learning rate for the training process given a fixed number of epochs. The proposed algorithm is evaluated on three widely used benchmark datasets of image classification and compared with 12 peer Non-EC based competitors and one EC based competitor. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms all of the peer competitors in terms of classification accuracy.


Author(s):  
Yun-Peng Liu ◽  
Ning Xu ◽  
Yu Zhang ◽  
Xin Geng

The performances of deep neural networks (DNNs) crucially rely on the quality of labeling. In some situations, labels are easily corrupted, and therefore some labels become noisy labels. Thus, designing algorithms that deal with noisy labels is of great importance for learning robust DNNs. However, it is difficult to distinguish between clean labels and noisy labels, which becomes the bottleneck of many methods. To address the problem, this paper proposes a novel method named Label Distribution based Confidence Estimation (LDCE). LDCE estimates the confidence of the observed labels based on label distribution. Then, the boundary between clean labels and noisy labels becomes clear according to confidence scores. To verify the effectiveness of the method, LDCE is combined with the existing learning algorithm to train robust DNNs. Experiments on both synthetic and real-world datasets substantiate the superiority of the proposed algorithm against state-of-the-art methods.


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