FracBNN: Accurate and FPGA-Efficient Binary Neural Networks with Fractional Activations
Yichi Zhang, Junhao Pan, Xinheng Liu, Hongzheng Chen, Deming Chen, Zhiru Zhang · 2021
Binary neural networks (BNNs) have 1-bit weights and activations. Such networks are well suited for FPGAs, as their dominant computations are bitwise arithmetic and the memory requirement is also significantly reduced. However, compared to start-of-the-art compact convolutional neural network (CNN) models, BNNs tend to produce a much lower accuracy on realistic datasets such as ImageNet. In addition, the input layer of BNNs has gradually become a major compute bottleneck, because it is conventionally excluded from binarization to avoid a large accuracy loss.