{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/how-low-can-we-go-trading-memory-for-error-in","title":"How Low Can We Go: Trading Memory for Error in Low-Precision Training","arxiv_id":"2106.09686","date":"2021-06-17","proceeding":"ICLR 2022 4","authors":["Chengrun Yang","Ziyang Wu","Jerry Chee","Christopher De Sa","Madeleine Udell"],"abstract":"Low-precision arithmetic trains deep learning models using less energy, less memory and less time. However, we pay a price for the savings: lower precision may yield larger round-off error and hence larger prediction error. As applications proliferate, users must choose which precision to use to train a new model, and chip manufacturers must decide which precisions to manufacture. We view these precision choices as a hyperparameter tuning problem, and borrow ideas from meta-learning to learn the tradeoff between memory and error. In this paper, we introduce Pareto Estimation to Pick the Perfect Precision (PEPPP). We use matrix factorization to find non-dominated configurations (the Pareto frontier) with a limited number of network evaluations. For any given memory budget, the precision that minimizes error is a point on this frontier. Practitioners can use the frontier to trade memory for error and choose the best precision for their goals.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2106.09686v3","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2106.09686v3.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"how-low-can-we-go-trading-memory-for-error-in","repo_url":"https://github.com/barterer/lp","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":0,"framework":"pytorch","reach":null}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"meta-learning","task_name":"Meta-Learning"}],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"syntology_url":"https://syntology.ai/paper/2106.09686","atlas_url":"https://app.syntology.ai/?focus=2106.09686","mcp":{"get_harvested_code_for_paper":{"arxiv_id":"2106.09686"}},"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers","read_at":"2026-09-25T09:33:49+00:00","read_at_is":"when the build read Syntology's graph, not when any sample ran","claim":"Per-sample execution status on synthesized fixtures; not a correctness claim about the paper. 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