The state-of-the-art hardware platforms for training Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) are moving from traditional single precision (32-bit) computations towards 16 bits of precision -- in large part due to the high energy efficiency and smaller bit storage associated with using reduced-precision representations. However, unlike inference, training with numbers represented with less than 16 bits has been challenging due to the need to maintain fidelity of the gradient computations during back-propagation. Here we demonstrate, for the first time, the successful training of DNNs using 8-bit floating point numbers while fully maintaining the accuracy on a spectrum of Deep Learning models and datasets. In addition to reducing the data and computation precision to 8 bits, we also successfully reduce the arithmetic precision for additions (used in partial product accumulation and weight updates) from 32 bits to 16 bits through the introduction of a number of key ideas including chunk-based accumulation and floating point stochastic rounding. The use of these novel techniques lays the foundation for a new generation of hardware training platforms with the potential for 2-4x improved throughput over today's systems.

本文介绍了使用较低的精度来训练深度神经网络的成功实践，通过引入基于块的操作和浮点随机取整等技术，成功地实现了在 8 位浮点数下对多种深度学习模型和数据集进行了精确的训练。这些新技术为新一代硬件训练平台奠定了基础，并具有提高 2-4 倍吞吐量的潜力。

使用8位浮点数训练深度神经网络