We revisit the one-shot Neural Architecture Search (NAS) paradigm and analyze its advantages over existing NAS approaches. Existing one-shot method, however, is hard to train and not yet effective on large scale datasets like ImageNet. This work propose a Single Path One-Shot model to address the challenge in the training. Our central idea is to construct a simplified supernet, where all architectures are single paths so that weight co-adaption problem is alleviated. Training is performed by uniform path sampling. All architectures (and their weights) are trained fully and equally.

/pdf/single-path-one-shot-neural-architecture-search-with-uniform-4ii4nep6rw.pdf

Single Path One-Shot Neural Architecture Search with Uniform Sampling

Model quantization is a widely used technique to compress and accelerate deep neural network (DNN) inference. Emergent DNN hardware accelerators begin to support mixed precision (1-8 bits) to further improve the computation efficiency, which raises a great challenge to find the optimal bitwidth for each layer: it requires domain experts to explore the vast design space trading off among accuracy, latency, energy, and model size, which is both time-consuming and sub-optimal. There are plenty of specialized hardware for neural networks, but little research has been done for specialized neural network optimization for a particular hardware architecture. Conventional quantization algorithm ignores the different hardware architectures and quantizes all the layers in a uniform way. In this paper, we introduce the Hardware-Aware Automated Quantization (HAQ) framework which leverages the reinforcement learning to automatically determine the quantization policy, and we take the hardware accelerator's feedback in the design loop. Rather than relying on proxy signals such as FLOPs and model size, we employ a hardware simulator to generate direct feedback signals (latency and energy) to the RL agent. Compared with conventional methods, our framework is fully automated and can specialize the quantization policy for different neural network architectures and hardware architectures. Our framework effectively reduced the latency by 1.4-1.95x and the energy consumption by 1.9x with negligible loss of accuracy compared with the fixed bitwidth (8 bits) quantization. Our framework reveals that the optimal policies on different hardware architectures (i.e., edge and cloud architectures) under different resource constraints (i.e., latency, energy and model size) are drastically different. We interpreted the implication of different quantization policies, which offer insights for both neural network architecture design and hardware architecture design.

/pdf/haq-hardware-aware-automated-quantization-with-mixed-12grmv9u6t.pdf

HAQ: Hardware-Aware Automated Quantization With Mixed Precision

Model quantization is a widely used technique to compress and accelerate deep neural network (DNN) inference. Emergent DNN hardware accelerators begin to support mixed precision (1-8 bits) to further improve the computation efficiency, which raises a great challenge to find the optimal bitwidth for each layer: it requires domain experts to explore the vast design space trading off among accuracy, latency, energy, and model size, which is both time-consuming and sub-optimal. Conventional quantization algorithm ignores the different hardware architectures and quantizes all the layers in a uniform way. In this paper, we introduce the Hardware-Aware Automated Quantization (HAQ) framework which leverages the reinforcement learning to automatically determine the quantization policy, and we take the hardware accelerator's feedback in the design loop. Rather than relying on proxy signals such as FLOPs and model size, we employ a hardware simulator to generate direct feedback signals (latency and energy) to the RL agent. Compared with conventional methods, our framework is fully automated and can specialize the quantization policy for different neural network architectures and hardware architectures. Our framework effectively reduced the latency by 1.4-1.95x and the energy consumption by 1.9x with negligible loss of accuracy compared with the fixed bitwidth (8 bits) quantization. Our framework reveals that the optimal policies on different hardware architectures (i.e., edge and cloud architectures) under different resource constraints (i.e., latency, energy and model size) are drastically different. We interpreted the implication of different quantization policies, which offer insights for both neural network architecture design and hardware architecture design.

HAQ: Hardware-Aware Automated Quantization with Mixed Precision

Hardware-friendly network quantization (e.g., binary/uniform quantization) can efﬁciently accelerate the inference and meanwhile reduce memory consumption of the deep neural networks, which is crucial for model deployment on resource-limited devices like mobile phones. However, due to the discreteness of low-bit quantization, existing quantization methods often face the unstable training process and severe performance degradation. To address this problem, in this paper we propose Differentiable Soft Quantization (DSQ) to bridge the gap between the full-precision and low-bit networks. DSQ can automatically evolve during training to gradually approximate the standard quantization. Owing to its differentiable property, DSQ can help pursue the accurate gradients in backward propagation, and reduce the quantization loss in forward process with an appropriate clipping range. Extensive experiments over several popular network structures show that training low-bit neural networks with DSQ can consistently outperform state-of-the-art quantization methods. Besides, our ﬁrst efﬁcient implementation for deploying 2 to 4-bit DSQ on devices with ARM architecture achieves up to 1.7× speed up, compared with the open-source 8-bit high-performance inference framework NCNN [31].

/pdf/differentiable-soft-quantization-bridging-full-precision-and-39a29s2lza.pdf

Differentiable Soft Quantization: Bridging Full-Precision and Low-Bit Neural Networks

Binary Neural Networks: A Survey

Deep learning algorithms achieve high classification accuracy at the expense of significant computation cost To address this cost, a number of quantization schemes have been proposed - but most of these techniques focused on quantizing weights, which are relatively smaller in size compared to activations This paper proposes a novel quantization scheme for activations during training - that enables neural networks to work well with ultra low precision weights and activations without any significant accuracy degradation This technique, PArameterized Clipping acTivation (PACT), uses an activation clipping parameter $\alpha$ that is optimized during training to find the right quantization scale PACT allows quantizing activations to arbitrary bit precisions, while achieving much better accuracy relative to published state-of-the-art quantization schemes We show, for the first time, that both weights and activations can be quantized to 4-bits of precision while still achieving accuracy comparable to full precision networks across a range of popular models and datasets We also show that exploiting these reduced-precision computational units in hardware can enable a super-linear improvement in inferencing performance due to a significant reduction in the area of accelerator compute engines coupled with the ability to retain the quantized model and activation data in on-chip memories

/pdf/pact-parameterized-clipping-activation-for-quantized-neural-544x8orkhr.pdf

PACT: Parameterized Clipping Activation for Quantized Neural Networks

Deep learning algorithms achieve high classification accuracy at the expense of significant computation cost. In order to reduce this cost, several quantization schemes have gained attention recently with some focusing on weight quantization, and others focusing on quantizing activations. This paper proposes novel techniques that target weight and activation quantizations separately resulting in an overall quantized neural network (QNN). The activation quantization technique, PArameterized Clipping acTivation (PACT), uses an activation clipping parameter $\alpha$ that is optimized during training to find the right quantization scale. The weight quantization scheme, statistics-aware weight binning (SAWB), finds the optimal scaling factor that minimizes the quantization error based on the statistical characteristics of the distribution of weights without the need for an exhaustive search. The combination of PACT and SAWB results in a 2-bit QNN that achieves state-of-the-art classification accuracy (comparable to full precision networks) across a range of popular models and datasets.

Bridging the accuracy gap for 2-bit Quantized Neural Networks (QNN)

In recent years, Federated Learning (FL) has shown significant advancements in its ability to perform various natural language processing (NLP) tasks. This work focuses on applying personalized FL for on-device language modeling. Due to limitations of memory and latency, these models cannot support the complexity of sub-word tokenization or beam search decoding, resulting in the decision to deploy a closed-vocabulary language model. However, closed-vocabulary models are unable to handle out-of-vocabulary (OOV) words belonging to specific users. To address this issue, We propose a novel technique called"OOV expansion"that improves OOV coverage and increases model accuracy while minimizing the impact on memory and latency. This method introduces a personalized"OOV adapter"that effectively transfers knowledge from a central model and learns word embedding for personalized vocabulary. OOV expansion significantly outperforms standard FL personalization methods on a set of common FL benchmarks.

Now It Sounds Like You: Learning Personalized Vocabulary On Device

Recent task-oriented dialog systems have had great success in building English-based personal assistants, but extending these systems to a global audience is challenging due to the need for annotated data in the target language. An alternative approach is to leverage existing data in a high-resource language to enable cross-lingual transfer in low-resource language models. However, this type of transfer has not been widely explored in natural language response generation. In this research, we investigate the use of state-of-the-art multilingual models such as mBART and T5 to facilitate zero-shot and few-shot transfer of code-switched responses. We propose a new adapter-based framework that allows for efficient transfer by learning task-specific representations and encapsulating source and target language representations. Our framework is able to successfully transfer language knowledge even when the target language corpus is limited. We present both quantitative and qualitative analyses to evaluate the effectiveness of our approach.

Pierce I.Jen Chuang

Papers

PACT: Parameterized Clipping Activation for Quantized Neural Networks

Bridging the accuracy gap for 2-bit Quantized Neural Networks (QNN)

Now It Sounds Like You: Learning Personalized Vocabulary On Device

Towards Zero-Shot Multilingual Transfer for Code-Switched Responses