# Pruning Ternary Quantization

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2107.10998 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.10998/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 42 of its 59 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 23 Jul 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 42)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1405.0312/) (2014)
- [ImageNet Large Scale Visual Recognition Challenge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.0575/) (2014)
- [Mask R-CNN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06870/) (2017)
- [SGDR: Stochastic Gradient Descent with Warm Restarts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.03983/) (2016)
- [MobileNetV2: Inverted Residuals and Linear Bottlenecks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.04381/) (2018)
- [Deep Compression: Compressing Deep Neural Networks with Pruning, Trained Quantization and Huffman Coding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1510.00149/) (2015)
- [Estimating or Propagating Gradients Through Stochastic Neurons for Conditional Computation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1308.3432/) (2013)
- [Pruning Filters for Efficient ConvNets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.08710/) (2016)
- [XNOR-Net: ImageNet Classification Using Binary Convolutional Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.05279/) (2016)
- [SphereFace: Deep Hypersphere Embedding for Face Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.08063/) (2017)
- [Channel Pruning for Accelerating Very Deep Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.06168/) (2017)
- [Learned Step Size Quantization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.08153/) (2019)
- [BinaryConnect: Training Deep Neural Networks with binary weights during propagations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.00363/) (2015)
- [DoReFa-Net: Training Low Bitwidth Convolutional Neural Networks with Low Bitwidth Gradients](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.06160/) (2016)
- [Weight Normalization: A Simple Reparameterization to Accelerate Training of Deep Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1602.07868/) (2016)
- [BRECQ: Pushing the Limit of Post-Training Quantization by Block Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.05426/) (2021)
- [PACT: Parameterized Clipping Activation for Quantized Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.06085/) (2018)
- [HAQ: Hardware-Aware Automated Quantization with Mixed Precision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.08886/) (2018)
- [HAWQ: Hessian AWare Quantization of Neural Networks with Mixed-Precision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.03696/) (2019)
- [Q-BERT: Hessian Based Ultra Low Precision Quantization of BERT](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.05840/) (2019)
- [EIE: Efficient Inference Engine on Compressed Deep Neural Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1602.01528/) (2016)
- [LQ-Nets: Learned Quantization for Highly Accurate and Compact Deep Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.10029/) (2018)
- [ZeroQ: A Novel Zero Shot Quantization Framework](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.00281/) (2020)
- [Variational Dropout Sparsifies Deep Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1701.05369/) (2017)
- [Network Trimming: A Data-Driven Neuron Pruning Approach towards Efficient Deep Architectures](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.03250/) (2016)
- [Quantized Convolutional Neural Networks for Mobile Devices](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.06473/) (2015)
- [Trained Ternary Quantization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.01064/) (2016)
- [Ternary Weight Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1605.04711/) (2016)
- [Compressing Deep Convolutional Networks using Vector Quantization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6115/) (2014)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Inference time, model size, and accuracy are three key factors in deep model compression. Most of the existing work addresses these three key factors separately as it is difficult to optimize them all at the same time. For example, low-bit quantization aims at obtaining a faster model; weight sharing quantization aims at improving compression ratio and accuracy; and mixed-precision quantization aims at balancing accuracy and inference time. To simultaneously optimize bit-width, model size, and accuracy, we propose pruning ternary quantization (PTQ): a simple, effective, symmetric ternary quantization method. We integrate L2 normalization, pruning, and the weight decay term to reduce the weight discrepancy in the gradient estimator during quantization, thus producing highly compressed ternary weights. Our method brings the highest test accuracy and the highest compression ratio. For example, it produces a 939kb (49×) 2bit ternary ResNet-18 model with only 4% accuracy drop on the ImageNet dataset. It compresses 170MB Mask R-CNN to 5MB (34×) with only 2.8% average precision drop. Our method is verified on image classification, object detection/segmentation tasks with different network structures such as ResNet-18, ResNet-50, and MobileNetV2.