Deep Neural Networks (DNN) have achieved state-of-the-art results in a wide
range of tasks, with the best results obtained with large training sets and
large models. In the past, GPUs enabled these breakthroughs because of their
greater computational speed. In the future, faster computation at both training
and test time is likely to be crucial for further progress and for consumer
applications on low-power devices. As a result, there is much interest in
research and development of dedicated hardware for Deep Learning (DL). Binary
weights, i.e., weights which are constrained to only two possible values (e.g.
-1 or 1), would bring great benefits to specialized DL hardware by replacing
many multiply-accumulate operations by simple accumulations, as multipliers are
the most space and power-hungry components of the digital implementation of
neural networks. We introduce BinaryConnect, a method which consists in
training a DNN with binary weights during the forward and backward
propagations, while retaining precision of the stored weights in which
gradients are accumulated. Like other dropout schemes, we show that
BinaryConnect acts as regularizer and we obtain near state-of-the-art results
with BinaryConnect on the permutation-invariant MNIST, CIFAR-10 and SVHN.

该研究介绍了一种名为 BinaryConnect 的方法，该方法通过对神经网络进行二进制权重的训练和保留梯度累积精度的方式，取代传统神经网络中高昂代价的乘法运算，提高特定硬件上的深度学习性能，并取得了接近最优的结果。