WRPN & Apprentice: Methods for Training and Inference using Low-Precision Numerics

Abstract: Today's high performance deep learning architectures involve large models with numerous parameters. Low precision numerics has emerged as a popular technique to reduce both the compute and memory requirements of these large models. However, lowering precision often leads to accuracy degradation. We describe three schemes whereby one can both train and do efficient inference using low precision numerics without hurting accuracy. Finally, we describe an efficient hardware accelerator that can take advantage of the proposed low precision numerics.