Designing accurate and efficient ConvNets for mobile devices is challenging because the design space is combinatorially large. Due to this, previous neural architecture search (NAS) methods are computationally expensive. ConvNet architecture optimality depends on factors such as input resolution and target devices. However, existing approaches are too resource demanding for case-by-case redesigns. Also, previous work focuses primarily on reducing FLOPs, but FLOP count does not always reflect actual latency. To address these, we propose a differentiable neural architecture search (DNAS) framework that uses gradient-based methods to optimize Con-vNet architectures, avoiding enumerating and training individual architectures separately as in previous methods. FBNets (Facebook-Berkeley-Nets), a family of models discovered by DNAS surpass state-of-the-art models both designed manually and generated automatically. FBNet-B achieves 74.1% top-1 accuracy on ImageNet with 295M FLOPs and 23.1 ms latency on a Samsung S8 phone, 2.4x smaller and 1.5x faster than MobileNetV2-1.3[17] with similar accuracy. Despite higher accuracy and lower latency than MnasNet[20], we estimate FBNet-B's search cost is 420x smaller than MnasNet's, at only 216 GPUhours. Searched for different resolutions and channel sizes, FBNets achieve 1.5% to 6.4% higher accuracy than Mo-bileNetV2. The smallest FBNet achieves 50.2% accuracy and 2.9 ms latency (345 frames per second) on a Samsung S8. Over a Samsung-optimized FBNet, the iPhone-Xoptimized model achieves a 1.4x speedup on an iPhone X. FBNet models are open-sourced at https://github. com/facebookresearch/mobile-vision. * Work done while interning at Facebook. … … Stochastic super net Distribution Operators Probability Training super net Proxy dataset Sampling Operator Latency LUT Deploy Target device Benchmark … Search space … … Neural Architectures Figure 1. Differentiable neural architecture search (DNAS) for ConvNet design. DNAS explores a layer-wise space that each layer of a ConvNet can choose a different block. The search space is represented by a stochastic super net. The search process trains the stochastic super net using SGD to optimize the architecture distribution. Optimal architectures are sampled from the trained distribution. The latency of each operator is measured on target devices and used to compute the loss for the super net.

This paper proposes an efficient neural network (NN) architecture design methodology called Chameleon that honors given resource constraints. Instead of developing new building blocks or using computationally-intensive reinforcement learning algorithms, our approach leverages existing efficient network building blocks and focuses on exploiting hardware traits and adapting computation resources to fit target latency and/or energy constraints. We formulate platform-aware NN architecture search in an optimization framework and propose a novel algorithm to search for optimal architectures aided by efficient accuracy and resource (latency and/or energy) predictors. At the core of our algorithm lies an accuracy predictor built atop Gaussian Process with Bayesian optimization for iterative sampling. With a one-time building cost for the predictors, our algorithm produces state-of-the-art model architectures on different platforms under given constraints in just minutes. Our results show that adapting computation resources to building blocks is critical to model performance. Without the addition of any bells and whistles, our models achieve significant accuracy improvements against state-of-the-art hand-crafted and automatically designed architectures. We achieve 73.8% and 75.3% top-1 accuracy on ImageNet at 20ms latency on a mobile CPU and DSP. At reduced latency, our models achieve up to 8.5% (4.8%) and 6.6% (9.3%) absolute top-1 accuracy improvements compared to MobileNetV2 and MnasNet, respectively, on a mobile CPU (DSP), and 2.7% (4.6%) and 5.6% (2.6%) accuracy gains over ResNet-101 and ResNet-152, respectively, on an Nvidia GPU (Intel CPU).

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Computer vision has achieved great success using standardized image representations -pixel arrays, and the corresponding deep learning operators -convolutions. In this work, we challenge this paradigm: we instead (a) represent images as a set of visual tokens and (b) apply visual transformers to find relationships between visual semantic concepts. Given an input image, we dynamically extract a set of visual tokens from the image to obtain a compact representation for high-level semantics. We then use visual transformers to operate over the visual tokens to densely model relationships between them. We find that this paradigm of token-based image representation and processing drastically outperforms its convolutional counterparts on image classification and semantic segmentation. To demonstrate the power of this approach on ImageNet classification, we use ResNet as a convenient baseline and use visual transformers to replace the last stage of convolutions. This reduces the stage's MACs by up to 6.9x, while attaining up to 4.53 points higher top-1 accuracy. For semantic segmentation, we use a visual-transformer-based FPN (VT-FPN) module to replace a convolution-based FPN, saving 6.5x fewer MACs while achieving up to 0.35 points higher mIoU on LIP and COCO-stuff.Preprint. Under review.

Deep neural networks (DNNs) have begun to have a pervasive impact on various applications of machine learning. However, the problem of finding an optimal DNN architecture for large applications is challenging. Common approaches go for deeper and larger DNN architectures but may incur substantial redundancy. To address these problems, we introduce a network growth algorithm that complements network pruning to learn both weights and compact DNN architectures during training. We propose a DNN synthesis tool (NeST) that combines both methods to automate the generation of compact and accurate DNNs. NeST starts with a randomly initialized sparse network called the seed architecture. It iteratively tunes the architecture with gradient-based growth and magnitude-based pruning of neurons and connections. Our experimental results show that NeST yields accurate, yet very compact DNNs, with a wide range of seed architecture selection. For the LeNet-300-100 (LeNet-5) architecture, we reduce network parameters by 70.2× (74.3×) and floating-point operations (FLOPs) by 79.4× (43.7×). For the AlexNet and VGG-16 architectures, we reduce network parameters (FLOPs) by 15.7× (4.6×) and 30.2× (8.6×), respectively. NeST's grow-and-prune paradigm delivers significant additional parameter and FLOPs reduction relative to pruningonly methods. IntroductionOver the last decade, deep neural networks (DNNs) have begun to revolutionize myriad research domains, such as computer vision, speech recognition, and machine translation [1][2][3]. Their ability to distill intelligence from a dataset through multi-level abstraction can even lead to super-human performance [4]. Thus, DNNs are emerging as a new cornerstone of modern artificial intelligence.Though critically important, how to efficiently derive an appropriate DNN architecture from large datasets has remained an open problem. Researchers have traditionally derived the DNN architecture by sweeping through its architectural parameters and training the corresponding architecture until the point of diminishing returns in its performance. This suffers from three major problems. First, the widely used back-propagation (BP) algorithm assumes a fixed DNN architecture and only trains weights. Thus, training cannot improve the architecture. Second, a trial-and-error methodology can be inefficient when DNNs get deeper and contain millions of parameters. Third, simply going deeper and larger may lead to large, accurate, but over-parameterized DNNs. For example, Han et al. [5] showed that the number of parameters in VGG-16 can be reduced by 13× with no loss of accuracy.To address these problems, we propose a DNN synthesis tool (NeST) that trains both DNN weights and architectures. NeST is inspired by the learning mechanism of the human brain, where the number of synaptic connections increases upon the birth of a baby, peaks after a few months, and decreases steadily thereafter [6]. NeST starts DNN synthesis from a seed DNN architecture (birth point). It allows the DNN to grow connections and neurons base...

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