# Tiled Bit Networks: Sub-Bit Neural Network Compression Through Reuse of Learnable Binary Vectors

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2407.12075 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.12075/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 54 of its 66 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 16 Jul 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 54)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [PyTorch: An Imperative Style, High-Performance Deep Learning Library](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.01703/) (2019)
- [Swin Transformer: Hierarchical Vision Transformer using Shifted Windows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14030/) (2021)
- [Distilling the Knowledge in a Neural Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.02531/) (2015)
- [Communication-Efficient Learning of Deep Networks from Decentralized Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1602.05629/) (2016)
- [Explaining and Harnessing Adversarial Examples](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6572/) (2014)
- [PointNet: Deep Learning on Point Sets for 3D Classification and Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.00593/) (2016)
- [MobileNetV2: Inverted Residuals and Linear Bottlenecks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.04381/) (2018)
- [DistilBERT, a distilled version of BERT: smaller, faster, cheaper and lighter](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.01108/) (2019)
- [MobileNets: Efficient Convolutional Neural Networks for Mobile Vision Applications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.04861/) (2017)
- [FlashAttention: Fast and Memory-Efficient Exact Attention with IO-Awareness](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.14135/) (2022)
- [The Lottery Ticket Hypothesis: Finding Sparse, Trainable Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.03635/) (2018)
- [Informer: Beyond Efficient Transformer for Long Sequence Time-Series Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.07436/) (2020)
- [Estimating or Propagating Gradients Through Stochastic Neurons for Conditional Computation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1308.3432/) (2013)
- [FitNets: Hints for Thin Deep Nets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6550/) (2014)
- [Rethinking Attention with Performers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.14794/) (2020)
- [MLP-Mixer: An all-MLP Architecture for Vision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.01601/) (2021)
- [ShuffleNet V2: Practical Guidelines for Efficient CNN Architecture Design](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.11164/) (2018)
- [XNOR-Net: ImageNet Classification Using Binary Convolutional Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.05279/) (2016)
- [Channel Pruning for Accelerating Very Deep Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.06168/) (2017)
- [A White Paper on Neural Network Quantization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.08295/) (2021)
- [A Transformer-based Framework for Multivariate Time Series Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.02803/) (2020)
- [Quantized Neural Networks: Training Neural Networks with Low Precision Weights and Activations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.07061/) (2016)
- [Learning and Generalization in Overparameterized Neural Networks, Going Beyond Two Layers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.04918/) (2018)
- [A Survey of Model Compression and Acceleration for Deep Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.09282/) (2017)
- [MCUNet: Tiny Deep Learning on IoT Devices](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.10319/) (2020)
- [Learning Overparameterized Neural Networks via Stochastic Gradient Descent on Structured Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.01204/) (2018)
- [What's Hidden in a Randomly Weighted Neural Network?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.13299/) (2019)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Binary Neural Networks (BNNs) enable efficient deep learning by saving on storage and computational costs. However, as the size of neural networks continues to grow, meeting computational requirements remains a challenge. In this work, we propose a new form of quantization to tile neural network layers with sequences of bits to achieve sub-bit compression of binary-weighted neural networks. The method learns binary vectors (i.e. tiles) to populate each layer of a model via aggregation and reshaping operations. During inference, the method reuses a single tile per layer to represent the full tensor. We employ the approach to both fully-connected and convolutional layers, which make up the breadth of space in most neural architectures. Empirically, the approach achieves near fullprecision performance on a diverse range of architectures (CNNs, Transformers, MLPs) and tasks (classification, segmentation, and time series forecasting) with up to an 8x reduction in size compared to binary-weighted models. We provide two implementations for Tiled Bit Networks: 1) we deploy the model to a microcontroller to assess its feasibility in resource-constrained environments, and 2) a GPU-compatible inference kernel to facilitate the reuse of a single tile per layer in memory.
