ReCU: Reviving the Dead Weights in Binary Neural Networks
This work improves training efficiency and accuracy for binary neural networks, which are crucial for resource-constrained applications like mobile and embedded systems, representing a novel method for a known bottleneck.
The paper tackles the problem of slow convergence in binary neural networks (BNNs) by addressing 'dead weights' that are rarely updated during training, introducing a rectified clamp unit (ReCU) to revive them, which leads to faster training and state-of-the-art performance on CIFAR-10 and ImageNet.
Binary neural networks (BNNs) have received increasing attention due to their superior reductions of computation and memory. Most existing works focus on either lessening the quantization error by minimizing the gap between the full-precision weights and their binarization or designing a gradient approximation to mitigate the gradient mismatch, while leaving the "dead weights" untouched. This leads to slow convergence when training BNNs. In this paper, for the first time, we explore the influence of "dead weights" which refer to a group of weights that are barely updated during the training of BNNs, and then introduce rectified clamp unit (ReCU) to revive the "dead weights" for updating. We prove that reviving the "dead weights" by ReCU can result in a smaller quantization error. Besides, we also take into account the information entropy of the weights, and then mathematically analyze why the weight standardization can benefit BNNs. We demonstrate the inherent contradiction between minimizing the quantization error and maximizing the information entropy, and then propose an adaptive exponential scheduler to identify the range of the "dead weights". By considering the "dead weights", our method offers not only faster BNN training, but also state-of-the-art performance on CIFAR-10 and ImageNet, compared with recent methods. Code can be available at https://github.com/z-hXu/ReCU.