Ternary Weight Networks

We present a memory and computation efficient ternary weight networks (TWNs) - with weights constrained to +1, 0 and -1. The Euclidian distance between full (float or double) precision weights and the ternary weights along with a scaling factor is minimized in training stage. Besides, a threshold-based ternary function is optimized to get an approximated solution which can be fast and easily computed. TWNs have shown better expressive abilities than binary precision counterparts. Meanwhile, TWNs achieve up to 16$\times$ model compression rate and need fewer multiplications compared with the float32 precision counterparts. Extensive experiments on MNIST, CIFAR-10, and ImageNet datasets show that the TWNs…