Deepcabac: Plug & Play Compression of Neural Network Weights and Weight Updates

An increasing number of distributed machine learning applications require efficient communication of neural network parameterizations. DeepCABAC, an algorithm in the current working draft of the emerging MPEG-7 part 17 standard for compression of neural networks for multimedia content description and analysis, has demonstrated high compression gains for a variety of neural network models. In this paper we propose a method for employing DeepCABAC in a Federated Learning scenario for the exchange of intermediate differential parameterizations. Furthermore, we discuss the efficiency of DeepCABAC when compressing trained neural networks. Our experiments on large neural networks show that in both scenarios, DeepCABAC achieves competitive compression rates, without degrading the network accuracy.