Deep learning algorithms achieve high classification accuracy at the expense of significant computation cost. To address this cost, a number of quantization schemes have been proposed -but most of these techniques focused on quantizing weights, which are relatively smaller in size compared to activations. This paper proposes a novel quantization scheme for activations during training -that enables neural networks to work well with ultra low precision weights and activations without any significant accuracy degradation. This technique, PArameterized Clipping acTivation (PACT), uses an activation clipping parameter α that is optimized during training to find the right quantization scale. PACT allows quantizing activations to arbitrary bit precisions, while achieving much better accuracy relative to published state-of-the-art quantization schemes. We show, for the first time, that both weights and activations can be quantized to 4-bits of precision while still achieving accuracy comparable to full precision networks across a range of popular models and datasets. We also show that exploiting these reduced-precision computational units in hardware can enable a super-linear improvement in inferencing performance due to a significant reduction in the area of accelerator compute engines coupled with the ability to retain the quantized model and activation data in on-chip memories.
The authors have addressed my concerns, and clarified a misunderstanding of the baseline that I had, which I appreciate. I do think that it is a solid contribution with thorough experiments. I still keep my original rating of the paper because the method presented is heavily based on previous works, which limits the novelty of the paper. It uses previously proposed clipping activation function for quantization of neural networks, adding a learnable parameter to this function. 
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ORIGINAL REVIEW:
This paper proposes to use a clipping activation function as a replacement of ReLu to train a neural network with quantized weights and activations. It shows empirically that even though the clipping activation function obtains a larger training error for full-precision model, it maintains the same error when applying quantization, whereas training with quantized ReLu activation function does not work in practice because it is unbounded.
The experiments are thorough, and report results on many datasets, showing that PACT can reduce down to 4 bits of quantization of weights and activation with a slight loss in accuracy compared to the full-precision model. 
Related to that, it seams a bit an over claim to state that the accuracy decrease of quantizing the DNN with PACT in comparison with previous quantization methods is much less because the decrease is smaller or equal than 1%, when competing methods accuracy decrease compared to the full-precision model is more than 1%. Also, it is unfair to compare to the full-precision model using clipping, because ReLu activation function in full-precision is the standard and gives much better results, and this should be the reference accuracy. Also, previous methods take as reference the model with ReLu activation function, so it could be that in absolute value the accuracy performance of competing methods is actually higher than when using PACT for quantizing DNN.
OTHER COMMENTS:
- the list of contributions is a bit strange. It seams that the true contribution is number 1 on the list, which is to introduce the parameter \alpha in the activation function that is learned with back-propagation, which reduces the quantization error with respect to using ReLu as activation function. To provide an analysis of why it works and quantitative results, is part of the same contribution I would say.