How to Train Unstable Looped Tensor Network

A rising problem in the compression of Deep Neural Networks is how to reduce the number of parameters in convolutional kernels and the complexity of these layers by low-rank tensor approximation. Canonical polyadic tensor decomposition (CPD) and Tucker tensor decomposition (TKD) are two solutions to this problem and provide promising results. However, CPD often fails due to degeneracy, making the networks unstable and hard to fine-tune. TKD does not provide much compression if the core tensor is big. This motivates using a hybrid model of CPD and TKD, a decomposition with multiple Tucker models with small core tensor, known as block term decomposition (BTD). This paper proposes a more compact model that further compresses the BTD by enforcing core tensors in BTD identical. We establish a link between the BTD with shared parameters and a looped chain tensor network (TC). Unfortunately, such strongly constrained tensor networks (with loop) encounter severe numerical instability, as proved by y (Landsberg, 2012) and (Handschuh, 2015a). We study perturbation of chain tensor networks, provide interpretation of instability in TC, demonstrate the problem. We propose novel methods to gain the stability of the decomposition results, keep the network robust and attain better approximation. Experimental results will confirm the superiority of the proposed methods in compression of well-known CNNs, and TC decomposition under challenging scenarios

Stable Low-rank Tensor Decomposition for Compression of Convolutional Neural Network

Most state of the art deep neural networks are overparameterized and exhibit a high computational cost. A straightforward approach to this problem is to replace convolutional kernels with its low-rank tensor approximations, whereas the Canonical Polyadic tensor Decomposition is one of the most suited models. However, fitting the convolutional tensors by numerical optimization algorithms often encounters diverging components, i.e., extremely large rank-one tensors but canceling each other. Such degeneracy often causes the non-interpretable result and numerical instability for the neural network fine-tuning. This paper is the first study on degeneracy in the tensor decomposition of convolutional kernels. We present a novel method, which can stabilize the low-rank approximation of convolutional kernels and ensure efficient compression while preserving the high-quality performance of the neural networks. We evaluate our approach on popular CNN architectures for image classification and show that our method results in much lower accuracy degradation and provides consistent performance.