Learning to map between ferns with differentiable binary embedding networks

Current deep learning methods are based on the repeated, expensive application of convolutions with parameter-intensive weight matrices. In this work, we present a novel concept that enables the application of differentiable random ferns in end-to-end networks. It can then be used as multiplication-free convolutional layer alternative in deep network architectures. Our experiments on the binary classification task of the TUPAC'16 challenge demonstrate improved results over the state-of-the-art binary XNOR net and only slightly worse performance than its 2x more parameter intensive floating point CNN counterpart.

TernaryNet: Faster Deep Model Inference without GPUs for Medical 3D Segmentation using Sparse and Binary Convolutions

Deep convolutional neural networks (DCNN) are currently ubiquitous in medical imaging. While their versatility and high quality results for common image analysis tasks including segmentation, localisation and prediction is astonishing, the large representational power comes at the cost of highly demanding computational effort. This limits their practical applications for image guided interventions and diagnostic (point-of-care) support using mobile devices without graphics processing units (GPU). We propose a new scheme that approximates both trainable weights and neural activations in deep networks by ternary values and tackles the open question of backpropagation when dealing with non-differentiable functions. Our solution enables the removal of the expensive floating-point matrix multiplications throughout any convolutional neural network and replaces them by energy and time preserving binary operators and population counts. Our approach, which is demonstrated using a fully-convolutional network (FCN) for CT pancreas segmentation leads to more than 10-fold reduced memory requirements and we provide a concept for sub-second inference without GPUs. Our ternary approximation obtains high accuracies (without any post-processing) with a Dice overlap of 71.0% that are statistically equivalent to using networks with high-precision weights and activations. We further demonstrate the significant improvements reached in comparison to binary quantisation and without our proposed ternary hyperbolic tangent continuation. We present a key enabling technique for highly efficient DCNN inference without GPUs that will help to bring the advances of deep learning to practical clinical applications. It has also great promise for improving accuracies in large-scale medical data retrieval.