Binarized neural networks for resource-efficient hashing with minimizing quantization loss

Abstract

In order to solve the problem of memory consumption and computational requirements, this paper proposes a novel learning binary neural network framework to achieve a resource-efficient deep hashing. In contrast to floating-point (32-bit) full-precision networks, the proposed method achieves a 32x model compression rate. At the same time, computational burden in convolution is greatly reduced due to efficient Boolean operations. To this end, in our framework, a new quantization loss defined between the binary weights and the learned real values is minimized to reduce the model distortion, while, by minimizing a binary entropy function, the discrete optimization is successfully avoided and the stochastic gradient descend method can be used smoothly. More importantly, we provide two theories to demonstrate the necessity and effectiveness of minimizing the quantization losses for both weights and activations. Numerous experiments show that the proposed method can achieve fast code generation without sacrificing accuracy.