Deep Learning Inference in Facebook Data Centers: Characterization, Performance Optimizations and Hardware Implications

The application of deep learning techniques resulted in remarkable improvement of machine learning models. In this paper provides detailed characterizations of deep learning models used in many Facebook social network services. We present computational characteristics of our models, describe high performance optimizations targeting existing systems, point out their limitations and make suggestions for the future general-purpose/accelerated inference hardware. Also, we highlight the need for better co-design of algorithms, numerics and computing platforms to address the challenges of workloads often run in data centers.

On Periodic Functions as Regularizers for Quantization of Neural Networks

Deep learning models have been successfully used in computer vision and many other fields. We propose an unorthodox algorithm for performing quantization of the model parameters. In contrast with popular quantization schemes based on thresholds, we use a novel technique based on periodic functions, such as continuous trigonometric sine or cosine as well as non-continuous hat functions. We apply these functions component-wise and add the sum over the model parameters as a regularizer to the model loss during training. The frequency and amplitude hyper-parameters of these functions can be adjusted during training. The regularization pushes the weights into discrete points that can be encoded as integers. We show that using this technique the resulting quantized models exhibit the same accuracy as the original ones on CIFAR-10 and ImageNet datasets.