Deformable Butterfly: A Highly Structured and Sparse Linear Transform

Rui Lin, Jie Ran, King Hung Chiu, Graziano Chesi, Ngai Wong

Keywords: Deformable Butterfly, Linear transform, Model compression

TL;DR: A new kind of linear transform named deformable butterfly (DeBut) that generalizes the conventional butterfly matrices and can be adopted to various input-output dimensions.

Abstract: We introduce a new kind of linear transform named Deformable Butterfly (DeBut) that generalizes the conventional butterfly matrices and can be adapted to various input-output dimensions. It inherits the fine-to-coarse-grained learnable hierarchy of traditional butterflies and when deployed to neural networks, the prominent structures and sparsity in a DeBut layer constitutes a new way for network compression. We apply DeBut as a drop-in replacement of standard fully connected and convolutional layers, and demonstrate its superiority in homogenizing a neural network and rendering it favorable properties such as light weight and low inference complexity, without compromising accuracy. The natural complexity-accuracy tradeoff arising from the myriad deformations of a DeBut layer also opens up new rooms for analytical and practical research. The codes and Appendix are publicly available at: https://github.com/ruilin0212/DeBut.

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Community Implementations: [ 1 code implementation](https://www.catalyzex.com/paper/arxiv:2203.13556/code)

Code: https://github.com/ruilin0212/DeBut