Short floating-point representation for convolutional neural network inference

Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) are being widely used in computer vision tasks, and there have been many efforts to implement CNNs in ASIC or FPGA for power-hungry environments. Instead of the previous common representation, the fixed-point representation, this letter proposes a short floating-point representation for CNNs. The short floating-point representation is based on the normal floating-point representation, but has much less width and does not have complex cases like Not-a-Number and infinity cases. The short floating-point representation, contrary to the common belief, can produce a low-complexity computation logic because the operands of the multiplier logic can be shortened by the exponent concept of the floating-point representation. The exponent can also reduce the total length to reduce the SRAM area. The experimental results show that the short floating-point representation with 8-bit total width achieves less-than-1-percentage-point degradation without the aid of retraining in the top-5 accuracy on very deep CNNs of up to 152 layers and gives more than a 60% area reduction in the ASIC implementation.