# Neural Network Compression using Binarization and Few Full-Precision Weights

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2306.08960 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.08960/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 37 of its 64 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 15 Jun 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 37)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [PyTorch: An Imperative Style, High-Performance Deep Learning Library](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.01703/) (2019)
- [Very Deep Convolutional Networks for Large-Scale Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.1556/) (2014)
- [Mask R-CNN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06870/) (2017)
- [EfficientNet: Rethinking Model Scaling for Convolutional Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.11946/) (2019)
- [You Only Look Once: Unified, Real-Time Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.02640/) (2015)
- [Deep Compression: Compressing Deep Neural Networks with Pruning, Trained Quantization and Huffman Coding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1510.00149/) (2015)
- [The Lottery Ticket Hypothesis: Finding Sparse, Trainable Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.03635/) (2018)
- [Estimating or Propagating Gradients Through Stochastic Neurons for Conditional Computation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1308.3432/) (2013)
- [Learning both Weights and Connections for Efficient Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.02626/) (2015)
- [Identity Mappings in Deep Residual Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.05027/) (2016)
- [XNOR-Net: ImageNet Classification Using Binary Convolutional Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.05279/) (2016)
- [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)
- [The State of Sparsity in Deep Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.09574/) (2019)
- [Movement Pruning: Adaptive Sparsity by Fine-Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.07683/) (2020)
- [SpQR: A Sparse-Quantized Representation for Near-Lossless LLM Weight Compression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.03078/) (2023)
- [Pruning and Quantization for Deep Neural Network Acceleration: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.09671/) (2021)
- [Comparing Rewinding and Fine-tuning in Neural Network Pruning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.02389/) (2020)
- [Differentiable Soft Quantization: Bridging Full-Precision and Low-Bit Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.05033/) (2019)
- [Bi-Real Net: Enhancing the Performance of 1-bit CNNs With Improved Representational Capability and Advanced Training Algorithm](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.00278/) (2018)
- [Dynamic Network Surgery for Efficient DNNs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.04493/) (2016)
- [ReActNet: Towards Precise Binary Neural Network with Generalized Activation Functions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.03488/) (2020)
- [Forward and Backward Information Retention for Accurate Binary Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.10788/) (2019)
- [A Universal Law of Robustness via Isoperimetry](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.12806/) (2021)
- [Bayesian Bits: Unifying Quantization and Pruning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.07093/) (2020)
- [Network Quantization with Element-wise Gradient Scaling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.00903/) (2021)
- [Multi-Prize Lottery Ticket Hypothesis: Finding Accurate Binary Neural Networks by Pruning A Randomly Weighted Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.09377/) (2021)
- [ReCU: Reviving the Dead Weights in Binary Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.12369/) (2021)
- [Searching for Low-Bit Weights in Quantized Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.08695/) (2020)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Quantization and pruning are two effective Deep Neural Networks model compression methods. In this paper, we propose Automatic Prune Binarization (APB), a novel compression technique combining quantization with pruning. APB enhances the representational capability of binary networks using a few full-precision weights. Our technique jointly maximizes the accuracy of the network while minimizing its memory impact by deciding whether each weight should be binarized or kept in full precision. We show how to efficiently perform a forward pass through layers compressed using APB by decomposing it into a binary and a sparse-dense matrix multiplication. Moreover, we design two novel efficient algorithms for extremely quantized matrix multiplication on CPU, leveraging highly efficient bitwise operations. The proposed algorithms are 6.9x and 1.5x faster than available state-of-the-art solutions. We extensively evaluate APB on two widely adopted model compression datasets, namely CIFAR10 and ImageNet. APB delivers better accuracy/memory trade-off compared to state-of-the-art methods based on i) quantization, ii) pruning, and iii) combination of pruning and quantization. APB outperforms quantization in the accuracy/efficiency trade-off, being up to 2x faster than the 2-bit quantized model with no loss in accuracy.