Title: FastDeepIoT: Towards Understanding and Optimizing Neural Network Execution Time on Mobile and Embedded Devices,
Abstract: Deep neural networks show great potential as solutions to many sensing
application problems, but their excessive resource demand slows down execution
time, pausing a serious impediment to deployment on low-end devices. To address
this challenge, recent literature focused on compressing neural network size to
improve performance. We show that changing neural network size does not
proportionally affect performance attributes of interest, such as execution
time. Rather, extreme run-time nonlinearities exist over the network
configuration space. Hence, we propose a novel framework, called FastDeepIoT,
that uncovers the non-linear relation between neural network structure and
execution time, then exploits that understanding to find network configurations
that significantly improve the trade-off between execution time and accuracy on
mobile and embedded devices. FastDeepIoT makes two key contributions. First,
FastDeepIoT automatically learns an accurate and highly interpretable execution
time model for deep neural networks on the target device. This is done without
prior knowledge of either the hardware specifications or the detailed
implementation of the used deep learning library. Second, FastDeepIoT informs a
compression algorithm how to minimize execution time on the profiled device
without impacting accuracy. We evaluate FastDeepIoT using three different
sensing-related tasks on two mobile devices: Nexus 5 and Galaxy Nexus.
FastDeepIoT further reduces the neural network execution time by $48\%$ to
$78\%$ and energy consumption by $37\%$ to $69\%$ compared with the
state-of-the-art compression algorithms.