HQNAS: Auto CNN deployment framework for joint quantization and architecture search

Deep learning applications are being transferred from the cloud to edge with the rapid development of embedded computing systems. In order to achieve higher energy efficiency with the limited resource budget, neural networks(NNs) must be carefully designed in two steps, the architecture design and the quantization policy choice. Neural Architecture Search(NAS) and Quantization have been proposed separately when deploying NNs onto embedded devices. However, taking the two steps individually is time-consuming and leads to a sub-optimal final deployment. To this end, we propose a novel neural network design framework called Hardware-aware Quantized Neural Architecture Search(HQNAS) framework which combines the NAS and Quantization together in a very efficient manner using weight-sharing and bit-sharing. It takes only 4 GPU hours to discover an outstanding NN policy on CIFAR10. It also takes only %10 GPU time to generate a comparable model on Imagenet compared to the traditional NAS method with 1.8x decrease of latency and a negligible accuracy loss of only 0.7%. Besides, our method can be adapted in a lifelong situation where the neural network needs to evolve occasionally due to changes of local data, environment and user preference.

FAQS: Communication-efficient Federate DNN Architecture and Quantization Co-Search for personalized Hardware-aware Preferences

Due to user privacy and regulatory restrictions, federate learning (FL) is proposed as a distributed learning framework for training deep neural networks (DNN) on decentralized data clients. Recent advancements in FL have applied Neural Architecture Search (NAS) to replace the predefined one-size-fit-all DNN model, which is not optimal for all tasks of various data distributions, with searchable DNN architectures. However, previous methods suffer from expensive communication cost rasied by frequent large model parameters transmission between the server and clients. Such difficulty is further amplified when combining NAS algorithms, which commonly require prohibitive computation and enormous model storage. Towards this end, we propose FAQS, an efficient personalized FL-NAS-Quantization framework to reduce the communication cost with three features: weight-sharing super kernels, bit-sharing quantization and masked transmission. FAQS has an affordable search time and demands very limited size of transmitted messages at each round. By setting different personlized pareto function loss on local clients, FAQS can yield heterogeneous hardware-aware models for various user preferences. Experimental results show that FAQS achieves average reduction of 1.58x in communication bandwith per round compared with normal FL framework and 4.51x compared with FL+NAS framwork.

Small-footprint Keyword Spotting with Graph Convolutional Network

Despite the recent successes of deep neural networks, it remains challenging to achieve high precision keyword spotting task (KWS) on resource-constrained devices. In this study, we propose a novel context-aware and compact architecture for keyword spotting task. Based on residual connection and bottleneck structure, we design a compact and efficient network for KWS task. To leverage the long range dependencies and global context of the convolutional feature maps, the graph convolutional network is introduced to encode the non-local relations. By evaluated on the Google Speech Command Dataset, the proposed method achieves state-of-the-art performance and outperforms the prior works by a large margin with lower computational cost.