Binary neural network (BNN) is an extreme quantization version of convolutional neural networks (CNNs) with all features and weights mapped to just 1-bit. Although BNN saves a lot of memory and computation demand to make CNN applicable on edge or mobile devices, BNN suffers the drop of network performance due to the reduced representation capability after binarization. In this paper, we propose a new replaceable and easy-to-use convolution module RepConv, which enhances feature maps through replicating input or output along channel dimension by $\beta$ times without extra cost on the number of parameters and convolutional computation. We also define a set of RepTran rules to use RepConv throughout BNN modules like binary convolution, fully connected layer and batch normalization. Experiments demonstrate that after the RepTran transformation, a set of highly cited BNNs have achieved universally better performance than the original BNN versions. For example, the Top-1 accuracy of Rep-ReCU-ResNet-20, i.e., a RepBconv enhanced ReCU-ResNet-20, reaches 88.97% on CIFAR-10, which is 1.47% higher than that of the original network. And Rep-AdamBNN-ReActNet-A achieves 71.342% Top-1 accuracy on ImageNet, a fresh state-of-the-art result of BNNs. Code and models are available at:https://github.com/imfinethanks/Rep_AdamBNN.

本文介绍一种名称为RepConv的可替换并易于使用的卷积模块，通过在通道维度上复制输入或输出以增强特征图，以提高二进制神经网络（BNN）的性能和准确性，并使用RepTran规则在整个BNN模块中应用RepConv使得BNN在CIFAR-10和ImageNet数据集上均有显著的性能提升

RepBNN: 通过重复以增强特征图的方式朝着更精确的二值神经网络迈进