SPFQ: A Stochastic Algorithm and Its Error Analysis for Neural Network
  Quantization
Jinjie Zhang Rayan Saab
Quantization is a widely used compression method that effectively reduces
redundancies in over-parameterized neural networks. However, existing
quantization techniques for deep neural networks often lack a comprehensive
error analysis due to the presence of non-convex loss functions and nonlinear
activations. In this paper, we propose a fast stochastic algorithm for
quantizing the weights of fully trained neural networks. Our approach leverages
a greedy path-following mechanism in combination with a stochastic quantizer.
Its computational complexity scales only linearly with the number of weights in
the network, thereby enabling the efficient quantization of large networks.
Importantly, we establish, for the first time, full-network error bounds, under
an infinite alphabet condition and minimal assumptions on the weights and input
data. As an application of this result, we prove that when quantizing a
multi-layer network having Gaussian weights, the relative square quantization
error exhibits a linear decay as the degree of over-parametrization increases.
Furthermore, we demonstrate that it is possible to achieve error bounds
equivalent to those obtained in the infinite alphabet case, using on the order
of a mere $\log\log N$ bits per weight, where $N$ represents the largest number
of neurons in a layer.