Towards Fast and Energy-Efficient Binarized Neural Network Inference on FPGA

Abstract

Binarized Neural Network (BNN) removes bitwidth redundancy in classical CNN by using a single bit (-1/+1) for network parameters and intermediate representations, which has greatly reduced the off-chip data transfer and storage overhead. However, a large amount of computation redundancy still exists in BNN inference. By analyzing local properties of images and the learned BNN kernel weights, we observe an average of ~78% input similarity and ~59% weight similarity among weight kernels, measured by our proposed metric in common network architectures. Thus there does exist redundancy that can be exploited to further reduce the amount of on-chip computations.