# ISyNet: Convolutional Neural Networks design for AI accelerator

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2109.01932 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.01932/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 29 of its 59 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 4 Sep 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 29 of 29)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [Very Deep Convolutional Networks for Large-Scale Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.1556/) (2014)
- [Faster R-CNN: Towards Real-Time Object Detection with Region Proposal Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.01497/) (2015)
- [ImageNet Large Scale Visual Recognition Challenge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.0575/) (2014)
- [Batch Normalization: Accelerating Deep Network Training by Reducing Internal Covariate Shift](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1502.03167/) (2015)
- [EfficientNet: Rethinking Model Scaling for Convolutional Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.11946/) (2019)
- [Rethinking the Inception Architecture for Computer Vision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.00567/) (2015)
- [MobileNetV2: Inverted Residuals and Linear Bottlenecks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.04381/) (2018)
- [MobileNets: Efficient Convolutional Neural Networks for Mobile Vision Applications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.04861/) (2017)
- [Gaussian Error Linear Units (GELUs)](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.08415/) (2016)
- [YOLOv3: An Incremental Improvement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.02767/) (2018)
- [RandAugment: Practical automated data augmentation with a reduced search space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.13719/) (2019)
- [DARTS: Differentiable Architecture Search](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.09055/) (2018)
- [Neural Architecture Search with Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.01578/) (2016)
- [Accurate, Large Minibatch SGD: Training ImageNet in 1 Hour](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.02677/) (2017)
- [Averaging Weights Leads to Wider Optima and Better Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.05407/) (2018)
- [Learning Transferable Architectures for Scalable Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.07012/) (2017)
- [MnasNet: Platform-Aware Neural Architecture Search for Mobile](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.11626/) (2018)
- [Regularized Evolution for Image Classifier Architecture Search](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.01548/) (2018)
- [AutoAugment: Learning Augmentation Policies from Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.09501/) (2018)
- [ProxylessNAS: Direct Neural Architecture Search on Target Task and Hardware](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.00332/) (2018)
- [Deep Mutual Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.00384/) (2017)
- [Progressive Neural Architecture Search](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.00559/) (2017)
- [Meta Pseudo Labels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.10580/) (2020)
- [A Comprehensive Survey of Neural Architecture Search: Challenges and Solutions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.02903/) (2020)
- [Accelerator-aware Neural Network Design using AutoML](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.02838/) (2020)
- [Sample-Efficient Neural Architecture Search by Learning Action Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.06832/) (2019)
- [Searching for Fast Model Families on Datacenter Accelerators](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.05610/) (2021)
- [Tensor Yard: One-Shot Algorithm of Hardware-Friendly Tensor-Train Decomposition for Convolutional Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.04029/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [NeoNeXt: Novel neural network operator and architecture based on the patch-wise matrix multiplications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.11251/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

In recent years Deep Learning reached significant results in many practical problems, such as computer vision, natural language processing, speech recognition and many others. For many years the main goal of the research was to improve the quality of models, even if the complexity was impractically high. However, for the production solutions, which often require real-time work, the latency of the model plays a very important role. Current state-of-the-art architectures are found with neural architecture search (NAS) taking model complexity into account. However, designing of the search space suitable for specific hardware is still a challenging task. To address this problem we propose a measure of hardware efficiency of neural architecture search space - matrix efficiency measure (MEM); a search space comprising of hardware-efficient operations; a latency-aware scaling method; and ISyNet - a set of architectures designed to be fast on the specialized neural processing unit (NPU) hardware and accurate at the same time. We show the advantage of the designed architectures for the NPU devices on ImageNet and the generalization ability for the downstream classification and detection tasks.
