Papers › DeepCABAC: A Universal Compression Algorithm for Deep Neural Networks

DeepCABAC: A Universal Compression Algorithm for Deep Neural Networks

27 Jul 2019arXiv:1907.11900archive 2025-07-28

Simon Wiedemann, Heiner Kirchoffer, Stefan Matlage, Paul Haase, Arturo Marban, Talmaj Marinc, David Neumann, Tung Nguyen, Ahmed Osman, Detlev Marpe, Heiko Schwarz, Thomas Wiegand, Wojciech Samek

The field of video compression has developed some of the most sophisticated and efficient compression algorithms known in the literature, enabling very high compressibility for little loss of information. Whilst some of these techniques are domain specific, many of their underlying principles are universal in that they can be adapted and applied for compressing different types of data. In this work we present DeepCABAC, a compression algorithm for deep neural networks that is based on one of the state-of-the-art video coding techniques. Concretely, it applies a Context-based Adaptive Binary Arithmetic Coder (CABAC) to the network's parameters, which was originally designed for the H.264/AVC video coding standard and became the state-of-the-art for lossless compression. Moreover, DeepCABAC employs a novel quantization scheme that minimizes the rate-distortion function while simultaneously taking the impact of quantization onto the accuracy of the network into account. Experimental results show that DeepCABAC consistently attains higher compression rates than previously proposed coding techniques for neural network compression. For instance, it is able to compress the VGG16 ImageNet model by x63.6 with no loss of accuracy, thus being able to represent the entire network with merely 8.7MB. The source code for encoding and decoding can be found at https://github.com/fraunhoferhhi/DeepCABAC.

PaperPDFCode

In Syntology Open this paper in Syntology's Atlas, the map of the papers in Syntology's graph and their citations.

Code

fraunhoferhhi/DeepCABAC officialmentioned in paperpytorch report

Repository list and official/mentioned flags are the archive's, frozen 2025-07-28. Reachability, where shown, is from one Syntology probe window (2026-09-16 to 2026-09-18); repositories not probed show nothing. GitHub stars are not tracked.

Code Syntology ran Syntology

Not run by Syntology. Nothing on this page verifies that the listed code works.

Tasks

Neural Network CompressionQuantizationVideo Compression

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

No leaderboard rows for this paper in the archive.

Report a problem or propose a change · a person checks every report against the paper or source before anything changes; decisions are listed on /corrections