Enabling Binary Neural Network Training on the Edge
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The ever-growing computational demands of increasingly complex machine learning models frequently necessitate the use of powerful cloud-based infrastructure for their training. Binary neural networks are known to be promising candidates for on-device inference due to their extreme compute and memory savings over higher-precision alternatives. However, their existing training methods require the concurrent storage of high-precision activations for all layers, generally making learning on memory-constrained devices infeasible. In this paper, we demonstrate that the backward propagation operations needed for binary neural network training are strongly robust to quantization, thereby making on-the-edge learning with modern models a practical proposition. We introduce a low-cost binary neural network training strategy exhibiting sizable memory footprint and energy reductions while inducing little to no accuracy loss vs Courbariaux Bengio's standard approach. These resource decreases are primarily enabled through the retention of activations exclusively in binary format. Against the latter algorithm, our drop-in replacement sees coincident memory requirement and energy consumption drops of 2–6×, while reaching similar test accuracy in comparable time, across a range of small-scale models trained to classify popular datasets. We also demonstrate from-scratch ImageNet training of binarized ResNet-18, achieving a 3.12× memory reduction. Such savings will allow for unnecessary cloud offloading to be avoided, reducing latency, increasing energy efficiency and safeguarding privacy.
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