Exponential Discretization of Weights of Neural Network Connections in Pre-Trained Neural Network. Part II: Correlation Maximization

Abstract—: In this article, we develop method of linear and exponential quantization of neural network weights. We improve it by means of maximizing correlations between the initial and quantized weights taking into account the weight density distribution in each layer. We perform the quantization after the neural network training without a subsequent post-training and compare our algorithm with linear and exponential quantization. The quality of the neural network VGG-16 is already satisfactory (top5 accuracy 76%) in the case of 3-bit exponential quantization. The ResNet50 and Xception neural networks show top5 accuracy at 4 bits 79% and 61%, respectively. © 2020, Allerton Press, Inc.