To Compress, or Not to Compress: Characterizing Deep Learning Model Compression for Embedded Inference
arXiv:1810.08899
Abstract
The recent advances in deep neural networks (DNNs) make them attractive for embedded systems. However, it can take a long time for DNNs to make an inference on resource-constrained computing devices. Model compression techniques can address the computation issue of deep inference on embedded devices. This technique is highly attractive, as it does not rely on specialized hardware, or computation-offloading that is often infeasible due to privacy concerns or high latency. However, it remains unclear how model compression techniques perform across a wide range of DNNs. To design efficient embedded deep learning solutions, we need to understand their behaviors. This work develops a quantitative approach to characterize model compression techniques on a representative embedded deep learning architecture, the NVIDIA Jetson Tx2. We perform extensive experiments by considering 11 influential neural network architectures from the image classification and the natural language processing domains. We experimentally show that how two mainstream compression techniques, data quantization and pruning, perform on these network architectures and the implications of compression techniques to the model storage size, inference time, energy consumption and performance metrics. We demonstrate that there are opportunities to achieve fast deep inference on embedded systems, but one must carefully choose the compression settings. Our results provide insights on when and how to apply model compression techniques and guidelines for designing efficient embedded deep learning systems.
arXiv comment8 pages, To appear in ISPA 2018
References in corpus (9)
- Neural Machine Translation by Jointly Learning to Align and Translate
- Distilling the Knowledge in a Neural Network
- Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition
- Deep Speech 2: End-to-End Speech Recognition in English and Mandarin
- Exploiting Linear Structure Within Convolutional Networks for Efficient Evaluation
- Compressing Deep Convolutional Networks using Vector Quantization
- An Analysis of Deep Neural Network Models for Practical Applications
- A Survey of Model Compression and Acceleration for Deep Neural Networks
- Distributed Deep Neural Networks over the Cloud, the Edge and End Devices