  Deep neural networks generally involve some layers with mil- lions of
parameters, making them difficult to be deployed and updated on devices with
limited resources such as mobile phones and other smart embedded systems. In
this paper, we propose a scalable representation of the network parameters, so
that different applications can select the most suitable bit rate of the
network based on their own storage constraints. Moreover, when a device needs
to upgrade to a high-rate network, the existing low-rate network can be reused,
and only some incremental data are needed to be downloaded. We first
hierarchically quantize the weights of a pre-trained deep neural network to
enforce weight sharing. Next, we adaptively select the bits assigned to each
layer given the total bit budget. After that, we retrain the network to
fine-tune the quantized centroids. Experimental results show that our method
can achieve scalable compression with graceful degradation in the performance.
