Nonlocal optimization of binary neural networks

Abstract: We explore training Binary Neural Networks (BNNs) as a discrete variable inference problem over a factor graph. We study the behaviour of this conversion in an under-parameterized BNN setting and propose stochastic versions of Belief Propagation (BP) and Survey Propagation (SP) message passing algorithms to overcome the intractability of their current formulation. Compared to traditional gradient methods for BNNs, our results indicate that both stochastic BP and SP find better configurations of the parameters in the BNN.