LANCE: Efficient Low-Precision Quantized Winograd Convolution for Neural Networks Based on Graphics Processing Units

Abstract: Accelerating deep convolutional neural networks has become an active topic and sparked an interest in academia and industry. In this paper, we propose an efficient low-precision quantized Winograd convolution algorithm, called LANCE, which combines the advantages of fast convolution and quantization techniques. By embedding linear quantization operations into the Winograd-domain, the fast convolution can be performed efficiently under low-precision computation on graphics processing units. We test neural network models with LANCE on representative image classification datasets, including SVHN, CIFAR, and ImageNet. The experimental results show that our 8-bit quantized Winograd convolution improves the performance by up to 2.40x over the full-precision convolution with trivial accuracy loss.