MAFAT: Memory-Aware Fusing and Tiling of Neural Networks for Accelerated Edge Inference

A rising research challenge is running costly machine learning (ML) networks locally on resource-constrained edge devices. ML networks with large convolutional layers can easily exceed available memory, increasing latency due to excessive OS swapping. Previous memory reduction techniques such as pruning and quantization reduce model accuracy and often require retraining. Alternatively, distributed methods partition the convolutions into equivalent smaller sub-computations, but the implementations introduce communication costs and require a network of devices. Distributed partitioning approaches can, however, also be used to run in a reduced memory footprint on a single device by subdividing the network into smaller operations. In this paper, we extend prior work on distributed partitioning into a memory-aware execution on a single device. Our approach extends prior fusing strategies to allow for multiple groups of convolutional layers that are fused and tiled independently. This enables trading off overhead versus data reuse in order to specifically reduces memory footprint. We propose a memory usage predictor coupled with a search algorithm to provide optimized fusing and tiling configurations for an arbitrary set of convolutional layers. When applied to the YOLOv2 object detection network, results show that our approach can run in less than half the memory, and with a speedup of up to 2.78 under severe memory constraints. Additionally, our algorithm will return a configuration with a latency that is within 6% of the best latency measured in a manual search.