Convolution Filter Compression via Sparse Linear Combinations of Quantized Basis

Abstract

Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have achieved significant performance on various real-life tasks. However, the large number of parameters in convolutional layers requires huge storage and computation resources, making it challenging to deploy CNNs on memory-constrained embedded devices. In this article, we propose a novel compression method that generates the convolution filters in each layer using a set of learnable low-dimensional quantized filter bases. The proposed method reconstructs the convolution filters by stacking the linear combinations of these filter bases. By using quantized values in weights, the compact filters can be represented using fewer bits so that the network can be highly compressed. Furthermore, we explore the sparsity of coefficients through L