Recurrent neural network compression based on low-rank tensor representation

Abstract

Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) has achieved many state-of-the-art performances on various complex tasks related to the temporal and sequential data. But most of these RNNs require much computational power and a huge number of parameters for both training and inference stage. Several tensor decomposition methods are included such as CANDECOMP/PARAFAC (CP), Tucker decomposition and Tensor Train (TT) to re-parameterize the Gated Recurrent Unit (GRU) RNN. First, we evaluate all tensor-based RNNs performance on sequence modeling tasks with a various number of parameters. Based on our experiment results, TT-GRU achieved the best results in a various number of parameters compared to other decomposition methods. Later, we evaluate our proposed TT-GRU with speech recognition task. We compressed the bidirectional GRU layers inside DeepSpeech2 architecture. Based on our experiment result, our proposed TT-format GRU are able to preserve the performance while reducing the number of GRU parameters significantly compared to the uncompressed GRU.