A foundation for exact binarized morphological neural networks

Published: 28 Oct 2023, Last Modified: 30 Nov 2023WANT@NeurIPS 2023 PosterEveryoneRevisionsBibTeX
Keywords: Neural Network Quantization, Deep Learning, Neural Network Binarization, Mathematical Morphology
TL;DR: We propose a model based on mathematical morphology to binarize neural network weights. In some cases, our binarization is theoretically guaranteed to be lossless.
Abstract: Training and running deep neural networks (NNs) often demands a lot of computation and energy-intensive specialized hardware (e.g. GPU, TPU...). One way to reduce the computation and power cost is to use binary weight NNs, but these are hard to train because the sign function has a non-smooth gradient. We present a model based on Mathematical Morphology (MM), which can binarize ConvNets without losing performance under certain conditions, but these conditions may not be easy to satisfy in real-world scenarios. To solve this, we propose two new approximation methods and develop a robust theoretical framework for ConvNets binarization using MM. We propose as well regularization losses to improve the optimization. We empirically show that our model can learn a complex morphological network, and explore its performance on a classification task.
Submission Number: 24
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