Adaptive Mixture of Low-Rank Factorizations for Compact Neural Modeling

Ting Chen, Ji Lin, Tian Lin, Song Han, Chong Wang, Denny Zhou

Abstract: Modern deep neural networks have a large amount of weights, which make them difficult to deploy on computation constrained devices such as mobile phones. One common approach to reduce the model size and computational cost is to use low-rank factorization to approximate a weight matrix. However, performing standard low-rank factorization with a small rank can hurt the model expressiveness and significantly decrease the performance. In this work, we propose to use a mixture of multiple low-rank factorizations to model a large weight matrix, and the mixture coefficients are computed dynamically depending on its input. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach on both language modeling and image classification tasks. Experiments show that our method not only improves the computation efficiency but also maintains (sometimes outperforms) its accuracy compared with the full-rank counterparts.

Keywords: low-rank factorization

TL;DR: A simple modification to low-rank factorization that improves performances (in both image and language tasks) while still being compact.