A storage-efficient ensemble classification using filter sharing on binarized convolutional neural networks

This paper proposes a storage-efficient ensemble classification to overcome the low inference accuracy of binary neural networks (BNNs). When external power is enough in a dynamic powered system, classification results can be enhanced by aggregating outputs of multiple BNN classifiers. However, memory requirements for storing multiple classifiers are a significant burden in the lightweight system. The proposed scheme shares the filters from a trained convolutional neural network (CNN) model to reduce storage requirements in the binarized CNNs instead of adopting the fully independent classifier. While several filters are shared, the proposed method only trains unfrozen learnable parameters in the retraining step. We compare and analyze the performances of the proposed ensemble-based systems depending on various ensemble types and BNN structures on CIFAR datasets. Our experiments conclude that the proposed method using the filter sharing can be scalable with the number of classifiers and effective in enhancing classification accuracy. With binarized ResNet-20 and ReActNet-10 on the CIFAR-100 dataset, the proposed scheme can achieve 56.74% and 70.29% Top-1 accuracies with 10 BNN classifiers, which enhances performance by 7.6% and 3.6% compared with that using a single BNN classifier.