AresB-Net: accurate residual binarized neural networks using shortcut concatenation and shuffled grouped convolution

This article proposes a novel network model to achieve better accurate residual binarized convolutional neural networks (CNNs), denoted as AresB-Net. Even though residual CNNs enhance the classification accuracy of binarized neural networks with increasing feature resolution, the degraded classification accuracy is still the primary concern compared with real-valued residual CNNs. AresB-Net consists of novel basic blocks to amortize the severe error from the binarization, suggesting a well-balanced pyramid structure without downsampling convolution. In each basic block, the shortcut is added to the convolution output and then concatenated, and then the expanded channels are shuffled for the next grouped convolution. In the downsampling when stride >1, our model adopts only the max-pooling layer for generating low-cost shortcut. This structure facilitates the feature reuse from the previous layers, thus alleviating the error from the binarized convolution and increasing the classification accuracy with reduced computational costs and small weight storage requirements. Despite low hardware costs from the binarized computations, the proposed model achieves remarkable classification accuracies on the CIFAR and ImageNet datasets.

Automated summary

AresB-Net introduces a novel network model for accurately binarized residual convolutional neural networks, reducing errors from binarization through feature reuse and decreasing computational costs and storage requirements. Despite low hardware costs, the model achieves remarkable classification accuracies on CIFAR and ImageNet datasets.