Retraining Quantized Neural Network Models with Unlabeled Data

Running neural network models on edge devices is attracting much attention by neural network researchers since edge computing technology is becoming more powerful than ever. However, deploying large neural network models on edge devices is challenging due to the limitation in available computing resources and storage space. Therefore, model compression techniques have been recently studied to reduce the model size and fit models on resource-limited edge devices. Compressing neural network models reduces the size of a model, but also degrades the accuracy of the model since it reduces the precision of weights in the model. Consequently, a retraining method is required to recover the accuracy of compressed models. Most existing retraining methods require the original labeled training datasets to retrain the models, but labeling is a time-consuming process. In particular, we cannot always access the original labeled datasets because of privacy policies and license limitations. In this paper, we propose a method to retrain a compressed neural network model with an unlabeled dataset that is different from the original labeled dataset. We compress the neural network model using quantization to decrease the size of the model. Subsequently, the compressed model is retrained by our proposed retraining method without using a labeled dataset to recover the accuracy of the model. We compared the proposed retraining method against the conventional retraining. The proposed method reduced the size of VGG-16 and ResNet-50 by 81.10% and 52.45%, respectively without significant accuracy loss. In addition, our proposed retraining method is clearly faster than the conventional retraining method.