Title: TensorQuant - A Simulation Toolbox for Deep Neural Network Quantization,
Abstract: Recent research implies that training and inference of deep neural networks
(DNN) can be computed with low precision numerical representations of the
training/test data, weights and gradients without a general loss in accuracy.
The benefit of such compact representations is twofold: they allow a
significant reduction of the communication bottleneck in distributed DNN
training and faster neural network implementations on hardware accelerators
like FPGAs. Several quantization methods have been proposed to map the original
32-bit floating point problem to low-bit representations. While most related
publications validate the proposed approach on a single DNN topology, it
appears to be evident, that the optimal choice of the quantization method and
number of coding bits is topology dependent. To this end, there is no general
theory available, which would allow users to derive the optimal quantization
during the design of a DNN topology. In this paper, we present a quantization
tool box for the TensorFlow framework. TensorQuant allows a transparent
quantization simulation of existing DNN topologies during training and
inference. TensorQuant supports generic quantization methods and allows
experimental evaluation of the impact of the quantization on single layers as
well as on the full topology. In a first series of experiments with
TensorQuant, we show an analysis of fix-point quantizations of popular CNN
topologies.