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Poster
Binarized Neural Networks
Itay Hubara · Matthieu Courbariaux · Daniel Soudry · Ran El-Yaniv · Yoshua Bengio

Mon Dec 05 09:00 AM -- 12:30 PM (PST) @ Area 5+6+7+8 #50
in Monday Posters »

We introduce a method to train Binarized Neural Networks (BNNs) - neural networks with binary weights and activations at run-time. At train-time the binary weights and activations are used for computing the parameter gradients. During the forward pass, BNNs drastically reduce memory size and accesses, and replace most arithmetic operations with bit-wise operations, which is expected to substantially improve power-efficiency. To validate the effectiveness of BNNs, we conducted two sets of experiments on the Torch7 and Theano frameworks. On both, BNNs achieved nearly state-of-the-art results over the MNIST, CIFAR-10 and SVHN datasets. We also report our preliminary results on the challenging ImageNet dataset. Last but not least, we wrote a binary matrix multiplication GPU kernel with which it is possible to run our MNIST BNN 7 times faster than with an unoptimized GPU kernel, without suffering any loss in classification accuracy. The code for training and running our BNNs is available on-line.

Keywords: Deep Learning or Neural Networks · (Application) Computer Vision

Author Information

Itay Hubara (Technion)
Matthieu Courbariaux (Université de Montréal)
Daniel Soudry (Columbia University)

I am an assistant professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering at the Technion, working in the areas of Machine learning and theoretical neuroscience. I am especially interested in all aspects of neural networks and deep learning. I did my post-doc (as a Gruss Lipper fellow) working with Prof. Liam Paninski in the Department of Statistics, the Center for Theoretical Neuroscience the Grossman Center for Statistics of the Mind, the Kavli Institute for Brain Science, and the NeuroTechnology Center at Columbia University. I did my Ph.D. (2008-2013, direct track) in the Network Biology Research Laboratory in the Department of Electrical Engineering at the Technion, Israel Institute of technology, under the guidance of Prof. Ron Meir. In 2008 I graduated summa cum laude with a B.Sc. in Electrical Engineering and a B.Sc. in Physics, after studying in the Technion since 2004.

Ran El-Yaniv (Technion)
Yoshua Bengio (Université de Montréal)

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