Differentiable Soft Quantization: Bridging Full-Precision and Low-Bit Neural Networks

Hardware-friendly network quantization (e.g., binary/uniform quantization) can efficiently accelerate the inference and meanwhile reduce memory consumption of the deep neural networks, which is crucial for model deployment on resource-limited devices like mobile phones. However, due to the discreteness of low-bit quantization, existing quantization methods often face the unstable training process and severe performance degradation. To address this problem, in this paper we propose Differentiable Soft Quantization (DSQ) to bridge the gap between the full-precision and low-bit networks. DSQ can automatically evolve during training to gradually approximate the standard quantization. Owing to its differentiable…