Binary neural networks (BNNs) are an attractive solution for developing and deploying deep neural network (DNN)-based applications in resource constrained devices. Despite their success, BNNs still suffer from a fixed and limited compression factor that may be explained by the fact that existing pruning methods for full-precision DNNs cannot be directly applied to BNNs. In fact, weight pruning of BNNs leads to performance degradation, which suggests that the standard binarization domain of BNNs is not well adapted for the task. This work proposes a novel more general binary domain that extends the standard binary one that is more robust to pruning techniques, thus guaranteeing improved compression and avoiding severe performance losses. We demonstrate a closed-form solution for quantizing the weights of a full-precision network into the proposed binary domain. Finally, we show the flexibility of our method, which can be combined with other pruning strategies. Experiments over CIFAR-10 and CIFAR-100 demonstrate that the novel approach is able to generate efficient sparse networks with reduced memory usage and run-time latency, while maintaining performance.

该论文提出了一种新的更一般的二进制域，扩展了标准二进制域，并且更适合剪枝技术，在保证性能的同时提高了压缩率，这种方法与其他修剪策略相结合可以生成高效稀疏网络，并减少内存使用和运行时间延迟。

稀疏化二进制神经网络的二进制域泛化