{"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/quantnet-learning-to-quantize-by-learning","title":"QuantNet: Learning to Quantize by Learning within Fully Differentiable Framework","arxiv_id":"2009.04626","date":"2020-09-10","proceeding":null,"authors":["Junjie Liu","Dongchao Wen","Deyu Wang","Wei Tao","Tse-Wei Chen","Kinya Osa","Masami Kato"],"abstract":"Despite the achievements of recent binarization methods on reducing the performance degradation of Binary Neural Networks (BNNs), gradient mismatching caused by the Straight-Through-Estimator (STE) still dominates quantized networks. This paper proposes a meta-based quantizer named QuantNet, which utilizes a differentiable sub-network to directly binarize the full-precision weights without resorting to STE and any learnable gradient estimators. Our method not only solves the problem of gradient mismatching, but also reduces the impact of discretization errors, caused by the binarizing operation in the deployment, on performance. Generally, the proposed algorithm is implemented within a fully differentiable framework, and is easily extended to the general network quantization with any bits. The quantitative experiments on CIFAR-100 and ImageNet demonstrate that QuantNet achieves the signifficant improvements comparing with previous binarization methods, and even bridges gaps of accuracies between binarized models and full-precision models.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2009.04626v1","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2009.04626v1.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":[],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"binarization","task_name":"Binarization"},{"task_slug":"image-classification","task_name":"Image Classification"},{"task_slug":"quantization","task_name":"Quantization"}],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[{"leaderboard":"/sota/image-classification-on-imagenet","task":"Image Classification","dataset":"ImageNet","model":"Ours","rank_in_archive_order":1003,"of":1060,"metrics":{"Top 1 Accuracy":"71.97%"},"uses_additional_data":false}],"syntology":{"syntology_url":null,"atlas_url":null,"mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}