Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) are a widely used form of deep neural networks, introducing state-of-the-art results for different problems such as image classification, computer vision tasks, and speech recognition. However, CNNs are compute intensive, requiring billions of multiply-accumulate (MAC) operations per input. To reduce the number of MACs in CNNs, we propose a value prediction method that exploits the spatial correlation of zero-valued activations within the CNN output feature maps, thereby saving convolution operations. Our method reduces the number of MAC operations by 30.4%, averaged on three modern CNNs for ImageNet, with top-1 accuracy degradation of 1.7%, and top-5 accuracy degradation of 1.1%.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.