Dynamic Programming Assisted Quantization Approaches for Compressing Normal and Robust DNN Models

In this work, we present effective quantization approaches for compressing the deep neural networks (DNNs). A key ingredient is a novel dynamic programming (DP) based algorithm to obtain the optimal solution of scalar K-means clustering. Based on the approaches with regularization and quantization function, two weight quantization approaches called DPR and DPQ for compressing normal DNNs are proposed respectively. Experiments show that they produce models with higher inference accuracy than recently proposed counterparts while achieving same or larger compression. They are also extended for compressing robust DNNs, and the relevant experiments show 16X compression of the robust ResNet-18 model with less than 3% accuracy drop on both natural and adversarial examples.