Block-term Tensor Neural Networks
This addresses efficiency issues for training and deployment on low-end devices, but is incremental as it builds on existing tensor approximation methods.
The paper tackles the challenge of large parameter counts in deep neural networks (DNNs) by approximating weight matrices with low-rank block-term tensors, achieving a very large compression ratio while preserving or improving representation power.
Deep neural networks (DNNs) have achieved outstanding performance in a wide range of applications, e.g., image classification, natural language processing, etc. Despite the good performance, the huge number of parameters in DNNs brings challenges to efficient training of DNNs and also their deployment in low-end devices with limited computing resources. In this paper, we explore the correlations in the weight matrices, and approximate the weight matrices with the low-rank block-term tensors. We name the new corresponding structure as block-term tensor layers (BT-layers), which can be easily adapted to neural network models, such as CNNs and RNNs. In particular, the inputs and the outputs in BT-layers are reshaped into low-dimensional high-order tensors with a similar or improved representation power. Sufficient experiments have demonstrated that BT-layers in CNNs and RNNs can achieve a very large compression ratio on the number of parameters while preserving or improving the representation power of the original DNNs.