Binary Stochastic Flip Optimization for Training Binary Neural Networks

For deploying deep neural networks on edge devices with limited resources, binary neural networks (BNNs) have attracted significant attention, due to their computational and memory efficiency. However, once a neural network is binarized, finetuning it on edge devices becomes challenging because most conventional training algorithms for BNNs are designed for use on centralized servers and require storing real-valued parameters during training. To address this limitation, this paper introduces binary stochastic flip optimization (BinSFO), a novel training algorithm for BNNs. BinSFO employs a parameter update rule based on Boolean operations, eliminating the need to store real-valued parameters and thereby reducing memory requirements and computational overhead. In experiments, we demonstrated the effectiveness and memory efficiency of BinSFO in fine-tuning scenarios on six image classification datasets. BinSFO performed comparably to conventional training algorithms with a 70.7% smaller memory requirement. Code is released at https://github.com/TatsukichiShibuya/ICASSP2025_BinSFO