Streamlined Deployment for Quantized Neural Networks

Running Deep Neural Network (DNN) models on devices with limited computational capability is a challenge due to large compute and memory requirements. Quantized Neural Networks (QNNs) have emerged as a potential solution to this problem, promising to offer most of the DNN accuracy benefits with much lower computational cost. However, harvesting these benefits on existing mobile CPUs is a challenge since operations on highly quantized datatypes are not natively supported in most instruction set architectures (ISAs). In this work, we first describe a streamlining flow to convert all QNN inference operations to integer ones. Afterwards, we provide techniques based on processing one bit position at a time (bit-serial) to show how QNNs can be efficiently deployed using common bitwise operations. We demonstrate the potential of QNNs on mobile CPUs with microbenchmarks and on a quantized AlexNet, which is 3.5× faster than an optimized 8-bit baseline.