Bayesian Automatic Model Compression

Model compression has drawn great attention in deep learning community. A core problem in model compression is to determine the layer-wise optimal compression policy, e.g., the layer-wise bit-width in network quantization. Conventional hand-crafted heuristics rely on human experts and are usually sub-optimal, while recent reinforcement learning based approaches can be inefficient during the exploration of the policy space. In this article, we propose Bayesian automatic model compression (BAMC), which leverages non-parametric Bayesian methods to learn the optimal quantization bit-width for each layer of the network. BAMC is trained in a one-shot manner, avoiding the back and forth (re)-training in reinforcement learning based approaches. Experimental results on various datasets validate that our proposed methods can find reasonable quantization policies efficiently with little accuracy drop for the quantized network.