float16 vs float32 for convolutional neural networks

Question

The standard is float32 but I\'m wondering under what conditions it\'s ok to use float16?

I\'ve compared running the same covnet with both datatypes and haven\'t noticed

Answer 1

Surprisingly, it's totally OK to use 16 bits, even not just for fun, but in production as well. For example, in this video Jeff Dean talks about 16-bit calculations at Google, around 52:00. A quote from the slides:

Neural net training very tolerant of reduced precision

Since GPU memory is the main bottleneck in ML computation, there has been a lot of research on precision reduction. E.g.

• Gupta at al paper "Deep Learning with Limited Numerical Precision" about fixed (not floating) 16-bit training but with stochastic rounding.

• Courbariaux at al "Training Deep Neural Networks with Low Precision Multiplications" about 10-bit activations and 12-bit parameter updates.

• And this is not the limit. Courbariaux et al, "BinaryNet: Training Deep Neural Networks with Weights and Activations Constrained to +1 or -1". Here they discuss 1-bit activations and weights (though higher precision for the gradients), which makes the forward pass super fast.

Of course, I can imagine some networks may require high precision for training, but I would recommend at least to try 16 bits for training a big network and switch to 32 bits if it proves to work worse.