Denoising Noisy Neural Networks: A Bayesian Approach With Compensation

Deep neural networks (DNNs) with noisy weights, which we refer to as noisy neural networks (NoisyNNs), arise from the training and inference of DNNs in the presence of noise. NoisyNNs emerge in many new applications, including the wireless transmission of DNNs, the efficient deployment or storage of DNNs in analog devices, and the truncation or quantization of DNN weights. This article studies a fundamental problem of NoisyNNs: how to reconstruct the DNN weights from their noisy manifestations. While prior works relied exclusively on the maximum likelihood (ML) estimation, this article puts forth a denoising approach to reconstruct DNNs with the aim of maximizing the inference accuracy of the reconstructed models. The superiority of our denoiser is rigorously proven in two small-scale problems, wherein we consider a quadratic neural network function and a shallow feedforward neural network, respectively. When applied to advanced learning tasks with modern DNN architectures, our denoiser exhibits significantly better performance than the ML estimator. Consider the average test accuracy of the denoised DNN model versus the weight variance to noise power ratio (WNR) performance. When denoising a noisy ResNet34 model arising from noisy inference, our denoiser outperforms ML estimation by up to 4.1 dB to achieve a test accuracy of 60%. When denoising a noisy ResNet18 model arising from noisy training, our denoiser outperforms ML estimation by 13.4 dB and 8.3 dB to achieve test accuracies of 60% and 80%, respectively.

Automated summary

This article investigates a fundamental problem of NoisyNNs, which is how to reconstruct the DNN weights from noise. A denoising approach is proposed to maximize the inference accuracy of the reconstructed models. Experimental results demonstrate that our denoiser outperforms the maximum likelihood estimation in small-scale problems and shows significantly better performance when applied to advanced learning tasks with modern DNN architectures.