Learning Architectures for Binary Networks

BiMLP: Compact Binary Architectures for Vision Multi-Layer Perceptrons

This paper studies the problem of designing compact binary architectures for vision multi-layer perceptrons (MLPs). We provide extensive analysis on the difficulty of binarizing vision MLPs and find that previous binarization methods perform poorly due to limited capacity of binary MLPs. In contrast with the traditional CNNs that utilizing convolutional operations with large kernel size, fully-connected (FC) layers in MLPs can be treated as convolutional layers with kernel size $1\times1$. Thus, the representation ability of the FC layers will be limited when being binarized, and places restri…

NAS-BNN：面向二值神经网络的神经架构搜索

NAS-BNN: Neural Architecture Search for Binary Neural Networks

本文提出NAS-BNN，一种针对二值神经网络的神经架构搜索方案，通过精心设计搜索空间和三种训练策略显著提升超网络及子网性能，在ImageNet和MS COCO数据集上取得优异的图像分类与目标检测结果。

Composite Binary Decomposition Networks

Binary neural networks have great resource and computing efficiency, while suffer from long training procedure and non-negligible accuracy drops, when comparing to the full-precision counterparts. In this paper, we propose the composite binary decomposition networks (CBDNet), which first compose real-valued tensor of each layer with a limited number of binary tensors, and then decompose some conditioned binary tensors into two low-rank binary tensors, so that the number of parameters and operations are greatly reduced comparing to the original ones. Experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of…

A GPU-Outperforming FPGA Accelerator Architecture for Binary Convolutional Neural Networks

FPGA-based hardware accelerators for convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have obtained great attentions due to their higher energy efficiency than GPUs. However, it is challenging for FPGA-based solutions to achieve a higher throughput than GPU counterparts. In this paper, we demonstrate that FPGA acceleration can be a superior solution in terms of both throughput and energy efficiency when a CNN is trained with binary constraints on weights and activations. Specifically, we propose an optimized FPGA accelerator architecture tailored for bitwise convolution and normalization that features mas…

Binary Multi Channel Morphological Neural Network

Neural networks and particularly Deep learning have been comparatively little studied from the theoretical point of view. Conversely, Mathematical Morphology is a discipline with solid theoretical foundations. We combine these domains to propose a new type of neural architecture that is theoretically more explainable. We introduce a Binary Morphological Neural Network (BiMoNN) built upon the convolutional neural network. We design it for learning morphological networks with binary inputs and outputs. We demonstrate an equivalence between BiMoNNs and morphological operators that we can use to b…

Binary Morphological Neural Network

In the last ten years, Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) have formed the basis of deep-learning architectures for most computer vision tasks. However, they are not necessarily optimal. For example, mathematical morphology is known to be better suited to deal with binary images. In this work, we create a morphological neural network that handles binary inputs and outputs. We propose their construction inspired by CNNs to formulate layers adapted to such images by replacing convolutions with erosions and dilations. We give explainable theoretical results on whether or not the resulting learne…

D-TrAttUnet: Dual-Decoder Transformer-Based Attention Unet Architecture for Binary and Multi-classes Covid-19 Infection Segmentation

In the last three years, the world has been facing a global crisis caused by Covid-19 pandemic. Medical imaging has been playing a crucial role in the fighting against this disease and saving the human lives. Indeed, CT-scans has proved their efficiency in diagnosing, detecting, and following-up the Covid-19 infection. In this paper, we propose a new Transformer-CNN based approach for Covid-19 infection segmentation from the CT slices. The proposed D-TrAttUnet architecture has an Encoder-Decoder structure, where compound Transformer-CNN encoder and Dual-Decoders are proposed. The Transformer-C…

Regularized Binary Network Training

There is a significant performance gap between Binary Neural Networks (BNNs) and floating point Deep Neural Networks (DNNs). We propose to improve the binary training method, by introducing a new regularization function that encourages training weights around binary values. In addition, we add trainable scaling factors to our regularization functions. Additionally, an improved approximation of the derivative of the sign activation function in the backward computation. These modifications are based on linear operations that are easily implementable into the binary training framework. Experiment…

A Power-Efficient Binary-Weight Spiking Neural Network Architecture for Real-Time Object Classification

Neural network hardware is considered an essential part of future edge devices. In this paper, we propose a binary-weight spiking neural network (BW-SNN) hardware architecture for low-power real-time object classification on edge platforms. This design stores a full neural network on-chip, and hence requires no off-chip bandwidth. The proposed systolic array maximizes data reuse for a typical convolutional layer. A 5-layer convolutional BW-SNN hardware is implemented in 90nm CMOS. Compared with state-of-the-art designs, the area cost and energy per classification are reduced by 7$\times$ and 2…

Improving Accuracy of Binary Neural Networks using Unbalanced Activation Distribution

Binarization of neural network models is considered as one of the promising methods to deploy deep neural network models on resource-constrained environments such as mobile devices. However, Binary Neural Networks (BNNs) tend to suffer from severe accuracy degradation compared to the full-precision counterpart model. Several techniques were proposed to improve the accuracy of BNNs. One of the approaches is to balance the distribution of binary activations so that the amount of information in the binary activations becomes maximum. Based on extensive analysis, in stark contrast to previous work…

Unsupervised Representation Learning for Binary Networks by Joint Classifier Learning

Self-supervised learning is a promising unsupervised learning framework that has achieved success with large floating point networks. But such networks are not readily deployable to edge devices. To accelerate deployment of models with the benefit of unsupervised representation learning to such resource limited devices for various downstream tasks, we propose a self-supervised learning method for binary networks that uses a moving target network. In particular, we propose to jointly train a randomly initialized classifier, attached to a pretrained floating point feature extractor, with a binar…

MoBiNet: A Mobile Binary Network for Image Classification

MobileNet and Binary Neural Networks are two among the most widely used techniques to construct deep learning models for performing a variety of tasks on mobile and embedded platforms.In this paper, we present a simple yet efficient scheme to exploit MobileNet binarization at activation function and model weights. However, training a binary network from scratch with separable depth-wise and point-wise convolutions in case of MobileNet is not trivial and prone to divergence. To tackle this training issue, we propose a novel neural network architecture, namely MoBiNet - Mobile Binary Network in …

Equal Bits: Enforcing Equally Distributed Binary Network Weights

Binary networks are extremely efficient as they use only two symbols to define the network: $\{+1,-1\}$. One can make the prior distribution of these symbols a design choice. The recent IR-Net of Qin et al. argues that imposing a Bernoulli distribution with equal priors (equal bit ratios) over the binary weights leads to maximum entropy and thus minimizes information loss. However, prior work cannot precisely control the binary weight distribution during training, and therefore cannot guarantee maximum entropy. Here, we show that quantizing using optimal transport can guarantee any bit ratio, …

Truncating Wide Networks using Binary Tree Architectures

Recent study shows that a wide deep network can obtain accuracy comparable to a deeper but narrower network. Compared to narrower and deeper networks, wide networks employ relatively less number of layers and have various important benefits, such that they have less running time on parallel computing devices, and they are less affected by gradient vanishing problems. However, the parameter size of a wide network can be very large due to use of large width of each layer in the network. In order to keep the benefits of wide networks meanwhile improve the parameter size and accuracy trade-off of …

AdaSTE: An Adaptive Straight-Through Estimator to Train Binary Neural Networks

We propose a new algorithm for training deep neural networks (DNNs) with binary weights. In particular, we first cast the problem of training binary neural networks (BiNNs) as a bilevel optimization instance and subsequently construct flexible relaxations of this bilevel program. The resulting training method shares its algorithmic simplicity with several existing approaches to train BiNNs, in particular with the straight-through gradient estimator successfully employed in BinaryConnect and subsequent methods. In fact, our proposed method can be interpreted as an adaptive variant of the origin…

Understanding weight-magnitude hyperparameters in training binary networks

Binary Neural Networks (BNNs) are compact and efficient by using binary weights instead of real-valued weights. Current BNNs use latent real-valued weights during training, where several training hyper-parameters are inherited from real-valued networks. The interpretation of several of these hyperparameters is based on the magnitude of the real-valued weights. For BNNs, however, the magnitude of binary weights is not meaningful, and thus it is unclear what these hyperparameters actually do. One example is weight-decay, which aims to keep the magnitude of real-valued weights small. Other exampl…

Binarizing MobileNet via Evolution-based Searching

Binary Neural Networks (BNNs), known to be one among the effectively compact network architectures, have achieved great outcomes in the visual tasks. Designing efficient binary architectures is not trivial due to the binary nature of the network. In this paper, we propose a use of evolutionary search to facilitate the construction and training scheme when binarizing MobileNet, a compact network with separable depth-wise convolution. Inspired by one-shot architecture search frameworks, we manipulate the idea of group convolution to design efficient 1-Bit Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs), as…

Training Compact Neural Networks with Binary Weights and Low Precision Activations

In this paper, we propose to train a network with binary weights and low-bitwidth activations, designed especially for mobile devices with limited power consumption. Most previous works on quantizing CNNs uncritically assume the same architecture, though with reduced precision. However, we take the view that for best performance it is possible (and even likely) that a different architecture may be better suited to dealing with low precision weights and activations. Specifically, we propose a "network expansion" strategy in which we aggregate a set of homogeneous low-precision branches to impli…

High-Capacity Expert Binary Networks

Network binarization is a promising hardware-aware direction for creating efficient deep models. Despite its memory and computational advantages, reducing the accuracy gap between binary models and their real-valued counterparts remains an unsolved challenging research problem. To this end, we make the following 3 contributions: (a) To increase model capacity, we propose Expert Binary Convolution, which, for the first time, tailors conditional computing to binary networks by learning to select one data-specific expert binary filter at a time conditioned on input features. (b) To increase repre…

Experimental Exploration of Compact Convolutional Neural Network Architectures for Non-temporal Real-time Fire Detection

In this work we explore different Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) architectures and their variants for non-temporal binary fire detection and localization in video or still imagery. We consider the performance of experimentally defined, reduced complexity deep CNN architectures for this task and evaluate the effects of different optimization and normalization techniques applied to different CNN architectures (spanning the Inception, ResNet and EfficientNet architectural concepts). Contrary to contemporary trends in the field, our work illustrates a maximum overall accuracy of 0.96 for full …

CP-NAS: Child-Parent Neural Architecture Search for Binary Neural Networks

Neural architecture search (NAS) proves to be among the best approaches for many tasks by generating an application-adaptive neural architecture, which is still challenged by high computational cost and memory consumption. At the same time, 1-bit convolutional neural networks (CNNs) with binarized weights and activations show their potential for resource-limited embedded devices. One natural approach is to use 1-bit CNNs to reduce the computation and memory cost of NAS by taking advantage of the strengths of each in a unified framework. To this end, a Child-Parent (CP) model is introduced to a…

XNOR-Net: ImageNet Classification Using Binary Convolutional Neural Networks

We propose two efficient approximations to standard convolutional neural networks: Binary-Weight-Networks and XNOR-Networks. In Binary-Weight-Networks, the filters are approximated with binary values resulting in 32x memory saving. In XNOR-Networks, both the filters and the input to convolutional layers are binary. XNOR-Networks approximate convolutions using primarily binary operations. This results in 58x faster convolutional operations and 32x memory savings. XNOR-Nets offer the possibility of running state-of-the-art networks on CPUs (rather than GPUs) in real-time. Our binary networks are…

Parallel Architecture and Hyperparameter Search via Successive Halving and Classification

We present a simple and powerful algorithm for parallel black box optimization called Successive Halving and Classification (SHAC). The algorithm operates in $K$ stages of parallel function evaluations and trains a cascade of binary classifiers to iteratively cull the undesirable regions of the search space. SHAC is easy to implement, requires no tuning of its own configuration parameters, is invariant to the scale of the objective function and can be built using any choice of binary classifier. We adopt tree-based classifiers within SHAC and achieve competitive performance against several str…

Controlling Information Capacity of Binary Neural Network

Despite the growing popularity of deep learning technologies, high memory requirements and power consumption are essentially limiting their application in mobile and IoT areas. While binary convolutional networks can alleviate these problems, the limited bitwidth of weights is often leading to significant degradation of prediction accuracy. In this paper, we present a method for training binary networks that maintains a stable predefined level of their information capacity throughout the training process by applying Shannon entropy based penalty to convolutional filters. The results of experim…

Learning to Train a Binary Neural Network

Convolutional neural networks have achieved astonishing results in different application areas. Various methods which allow us to use these models on mobile and embedded devices have been proposed. Especially binary neural networks seem to be a promising approach for these devices with low computational power. However, understanding binary neural networks and training accurate models for practical applications remains a challenge. In our work, we focus on increasing our understanding of the training process and making it accessible to everyone. We publish our code and models based on BMXNet fo…

An Efficient End-to-End 3D Voxel Reconstruction based on Neural Architecture Search

Using neural networks to represent 3D objects has become popular. However, many previous works employ neural networks with fixed architecture and size to represent different 3D objects, which lead to excessive network parameters for simple objects and limited reconstruction accuracy for complex objects. For each 3D model, it is desirable to have an end-to-end neural network with as few parameters as possible to achieve high-fidelity reconstruction. In this paper, we propose an efficient voxel reconstruction method utilizing neural architecture search (NAS) and binary classification. Taking the…

Training Competitive Binary Neural Networks from Scratch

Convolutional neural networks have achieved astonishing results in different application areas. Various methods that allow us to use these models on mobile and embedded devices have been proposed. Especially binary neural networks are a promising approach for devices with low computational power. However, training accurate binary models from scratch remains a challenge. Previous work often uses prior knowledge from full-precision models and complex training strategies. In our work, we focus on increasing the performance of binary neural networks without such prior knowledge and a much simpler …

Structured Binary Neural Networks for Accurate Image Classification and Semantic Segmentation

In this paper, we propose to train convolutional neural networks (CNNs) with both binarized weights and activations, leading to quantized models specifically} for mobile devices with limited power capacity and computation resources. Previous works on quantizing CNNs seek to approximate the floating-point information using a set of discrete values, which we call value approximation, but typically assume the same architecture as the full-precision networks. In this paper, however, we take a novel 'structure approximation' view for quantization---it is very likely that a different architecture ma…

Training Binary Multilayer Neural Networks for Image Classification using Expectation Backpropagation

Compared to Multilayer Neural Networks with real weights, Binary Multilayer Neural Networks (BMNNs) can be implemented more efficiently on dedicated hardware. BMNNs have been demonstrated to be effective on binary classification tasks with Expectation BackPropagation (EBP) algorithm on high dimensional text datasets. In this paper, we investigate the capability of BMNNs using the EBP algorithm on multiclass image classification tasks. The performances of binary neural networks with multiple hidden layers and different numbers of hidden units are examined on MNIST. We also explore the effective…

BinaryConnect: Training Deep Neural Networks with binary weights during propagations

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 possib…

Balanced Binary Neural Networks with Gated Residual

Binary neural networks have attracted numerous attention in recent years. However, mainly due to the information loss stemming from the biased binarization, how to preserve the accuracy of networks still remains a critical issue. In this paper, we attempt to maintain the information propagated in the forward process and propose a Balanced Binary Neural Networks with Gated Residual (BBG for short). First, a weight balanced binarization is introduced to maximize information entropy of binary weights, and thus the informative binary weights can capture more information contained in the activation…

Binary Patterns Encoded Convolutional Neural Networks for Texture Recognition and Remote Sensing Scene Classification

Designing discriminative powerful texture features robust to realistic imaging conditions is a challenging computer vision problem with many applications, including material recognition and analysis of satellite or aerial imagery. In the past, most texture description approaches were based on dense orderless statistical distribution of local features. However, most recent approaches to texture recognition and remote sensing scene classification are based on Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs). The d facto practice when learning these CNN models is to use RGB patches as input with training per…

Towards Lossless Binary Convolutional Neural Networks Using Piecewise Approximation

Binary Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) can significantly reduce the number of arithmetic operations and the size of memory storage, which makes the deployment of CNNs on mobile or embedded systems more promising. However, the accuracy degradation of single and multiple binary CNNs is unacceptable for modern architectures and large scale datasets like ImageNet. In this paper, we proposed a Piecewise Approximation (PA) scheme for multiple binary CNNs which lessens accuracy loss by approximating full precision weights and activations efficiently and maintains parallelism of bitwise operation…

Join the High Accuracy Club on ImageNet with A Binary Neural Network Ticket

Binary neural networks are the extreme case of network quantization, which has long been thought of as a potential edge machine learning solution. However, the significant accuracy gap to the full-precision counterparts restricts their creative potential for mobile applications. In this work, we revisit the potential of binary neural networks and focus on a compelling but unanswered problem: how can a binary neural network achieve the crucial accuracy level (e.g., 80%) on ILSVRC-2012 ImageNet? We achieve this goal by enhancing the optimization process from three complementary perspectives: (1)…

Binary DAD-Net: Binarized Driveable Area Detection Network for Autonomous Driving

Driveable area detection is a key component for various applications in the field of autonomous driving (AD), such as ground-plane detection, obstacle detection and maneuver planning. Additionally, bulky and over-parameterized networks can be easily forgone and replaced with smaller networks for faster inference on embedded systems. The driveable area detection, posed as a two class segmentation task, can be efficiently modeled with slim binary networks. This paper proposes a novel binarized driveable area detection network (binary DAD-Net), which uses only binary weights and activations in th…

Learning to map between ferns with differentiable binary embedding networks

Current deep learning methods are based on the repeated, expensive application of convolutions with parameter-intensive weight matrices. In this work, we present a novel concept that enables the application of differentiable random ferns in end-to-end networks. It can then be used as multiplication-free convolutional layer alternative in deep network architectures. Our experiments on the binary classification task of the TUPAC'16 challenge demonstrate improved results over the state-of-the-art binary XNOR net and only slightly worse performance than its 2x more parameter intensive floating poi…

RPR: Random Partition Relaxation for Training; Binary and Ternary Weight Neural Networks

We present Random Partition Relaxation (RPR), a method for strong quantization of neural networks weight to binary (+1/-1) and ternary (+1/0/-1) values. Starting from a pre-trained model, we quantize the weights and then relax random partitions of them to their continuous values for retraining before re-quantizing them and switching to another weight partition for further adaptation. We demonstrate binary and ternary-weight networks with accuracies beyond the state-of-the-art for GoogLeNet and competitive performance for ResNet-18 and ResNet-50 using an SGD-based training method that can easil…

TeamHerald@CHIPSAL 2026：基于Transformer架构和集成学习的尼泊尔语模因仇恨言论检测与情感分析

TeamHerald@CHIPSAL 2026: Hate Speech Detection and Sentiment Analysis of Nepali Memes using Transformer-based Architectures and Ensemble Learning

针对尼泊尔语模因中代码混合和资源匮乏问题，采用OCR提取文本并结合Transformer模型，发现硬/软投票集成策略在二分类和多分类任务中表现不同，软投票在多类情感任务中提升15.8%的Macro F1分数。

From Hashing to CNNs: Training BinaryWeight Networks via Hashing

Deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have shown appealing performance on various computer vision tasks in recent years. This motivates people to deploy CNNs to realworld applications. However, most of state-of-art CNNs require large memory and computational resources, which hinders the deployment on mobile devices. Recent studies show that low-bit weight representation can reduce much storage and memory demand, and also can achieve efficient network inference. To achieve this goal, we propose a novel approach named BWNH to train Binary Weight Networks via Hashing. In this paper, we first …

Supervised Hashing with End-to-End Binary Deep Neural Network

Image hashing is a popular technique applied to large scale content-based visual retrieval due to its compact and efficient binary codes. Our work proposes a new end-to-end deep network architecture for supervised hashing which directly learns binary codes from input images and maintains good properties over binary codes such as similarity preservation, independence, and balancing. Furthermore, we also propose a new learning scheme that can cope with the binary constrained loss function. The proposed algorithm not only is scalable for learning over large-scale datasets but also outperforms sta…

Optimal Transfer Learning Model for Binary Classification of Funduscopic Images through Simple Heuristics

Deep learning models have the capacity to fundamentally revolutionize medical imaging analysis, and they have particularly interesting applications in computer-aided diagnosis. We attempt to use deep learning neural networks to diagnose funduscopic images, visual representations of the interior of the eye. Recently, a few robust deep learning approaches have performed binary classification to infer the presence of a specific ocular disease, such as glaucoma or diabetic retinopathy. In an effort to broaden the applications of computer-aided ocular disease diagnosis, we propose a unifying model …

Learning to Hash with Binary Deep Neural Network

This work proposes deep network models and learning algorithms for unsupervised and supervised binary hashing. Our novel network design constrains one hidden layer to directly output the binary codes. This addresses a challenging issue in some previous works: optimizing non-smooth objective functions due to binarization. Moreover, we incorporate independence and balance properties in the direct and strict forms in the learning. Furthermore, we include similarity preserving property in our objective function. Our resulting optimization with these binary, independence, and balance constraints is…

Compact Hash Code Learning with Binary Deep Neural Network

Learning compact binary codes for image retrieval problem using deep neural networks has recently attracted increasing attention. However, training deep hashing networks is challenging due to the binary constraints on the hash codes. In this paper, we propose deep network models and learning algorithms for learning binary hash codes given image representations under both unsupervised and supervised manners. The novelty of our network design is that we constrain one hidden layer to directly output the binary codes. This design has overcome a challenging problem in some previous works: optimizin…

YodaNN: An Architecture for Ultra-Low Power Binary-Weight CNN Acceleration

Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have revolutionized the world of computer vision over the last few years, pushing image classification beyond human accuracy. The computational effort of today's CNNs requires power-hungry parallel processors or GP-GPUs. Recent developments in CNN accelerators for system-on-chip integration have reduced energy consumption significantly. Unfortunately, even these highly optimized devices are above the power envelope imposed by mobile and deeply embedded applications and face hard limitations caused by CNN weight I/O and storage. This prevents the adoption of…

Binary Ensemble Neural Network: More Bits per Network or More Networks per Bit?

Binary neural networks (BNN) have been studied extensively since they run dramatically faster at lower memory and power consumption than floating-point networks, thanks to the efficiency of bit operations. However, contemporary BNNs whose weights and activations are both single bits suffer from severe accuracy degradation. To understand why, we investigate the representation ability, speed and bias/variance of BNNs through extensive experiments. We conclude that the error of BNNs is predominantly caused by the intrinsic instability (training time) and non-robustness (train & test time). Inspir…

Transfer Learning with Binary Neural Networks

Previous work has shown that it is possible to train deep neural networks with low precision weights and activations. In the extreme case it is even possible to constrain the network to binary values. The costly floating point multiplications are then reduced to fast logical operations. High end smart phones such as Google's Pixel 2 and Apple's iPhone X are already equipped with specialised hardware for image processing and it is very likely that other future consumer hardware will also have dedicated accelerators for deep neural networks. Binary neural networks are attractive in this case bec…

Optimization of XNOR Convolution for Binary Convolutional Neural Networks on GPU

Binary convolutional networks have lower computational load and lower memory foot-print compared to their full-precision counterparts. So, they are a feasible alternative for the deployment of computer vision applications on limited capacity embedded devices. Once trained on less resource-constrained computational environments, they can be deployed for real-time inference on such devices. In this study, we propose an implementation of binary convolutional network inference on GPU by focusing on optimization of XNOR convolution. Experimental results show that using GPU can provide a speed-up of…

进化CNN架构：从定制设计到深度残差模型用于多样化图像分类和检测任务

Evolving CNN Architectures: From Custom Designs to Deep Residual Models for Diverse Image Classification and Detection Tasks

本文提出了一种定制CNN架构，通过比较不同深度和残差连接策略，展示了其在图像分类和检测任务中的性能优势，特别是在细粒度多类识别中表现突出。

Network Sketching: Exploiting Binary Structure in Deep CNNs

Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) with deep architectures have substantially advanced the state-of-the-art in computer vision tasks. However, deep networks are typically resource-intensive and thus difficult to be deployed on mobile devices. Recently, CNNs with binary weights have shown compelling efficiency to the community, whereas the accuracy of such models is usually unsatisfactory in practice. In this paper, we introduce network sketching as a novel technique of pursuing binary-weight CNNs, targeting at more faithful inference and better trade-off for practical applications. Our basic…