Median Binary-Connect Method and a Binary Convolutional Neural Nework for Word Recognition

11/07/2018

∙

by   Spencer Sheen, et al.

∙

0

∙

share

We propose and study a new projection formula for training binary weight convolutional neural networks. The projection formula measures the error in approximating a full precision (32 bit) vector by a 1-bit vector in the l_1 norm instead of the standard l_2 norm. The l_1 projector is in closed analytical form and involves a median computation instead of an arithmatic average in the l_2 projector. Experiments on 10 keywords classification show that the l_1 (median) BinaryConnect (BC) method outperforms the regular BC, regardless of cold or warm start. The binary network trained by median BC and a recent blending technique reaches test accuracy 92.4 the full-precision network accuracy 93.5 binary network doubles the speed of full-precision network in spoken keywords recognition.