To Fold or Not to Fold: a Necessary and Sufficient Condition on Batch-Normalization Layers Folding

To Fold or Not to Fold: a Necessary and Sufficient Condition on Batch-Normalization Layers Folding

Edouard Yvinec, Arnaud Dapogny, Kevin Bailly

Proceedings of the Thirty-First International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence
Main Track. Pages 1601-1607. https://doi.org/10.24963/ijcai.2022/223

Batch-Normalization (BN) layers have become fundamental components in the evermore complex deep neural network architectures. Such models require acceleration processes for deployment on edge devices. However, BN layers add computation bottlenecks due to the sequential operation processing: thus, a key, yet often overlooked component of the acceleration process is BN layers folding. In this paper, we demonstrate that the current BN folding approaches are suboptimal in terms of how many layers can be removed. We therefore provide a necessary and sufficient condition for BN folding and a corresponding optimal algorithm. The proposed approach systematically outperforms existing baselines and allows to dramatically reduce the inference time of deep neural networks.
Keywords:
Computer Vision: Machine Learning for Vision
Machine Learning: Learning Sparse Models
Machine Learning: Other