Deploy Large-Scale Deep Neural Networks in Resource Constrained IoT Devices with Local Quantization Region
This addresses the problem of real-time deep learning on low-cost IoT devices, offering a novel method to bridge the gap between advanced algorithms and hardware limitations.
The paper tackles the challenge of deploying large-scale deep neural networks on resource-constrained IoT devices by proposing a low-bit quantization scheme with a local quantization region algorithm, achieving results such as no accuracy drop with 2x speedup for an 8-bit scheme and only a 0.7% drop for a 2-bit scheme on Intel Edison.
Implementing large-scale deep neural networks with high computational complexity on low-cost IoT devices may inevitably be constrained by limited computation resource, making the devices hard to respond in real-time. This disjunction makes the state-of-art deep learning algorithms, i.e. CNN (Convolutional Neural Networks), incompatible with IoT world. We present a low-bit (range from 8-bit to 1-bit) scheme with our local quantization region algorithm. We use models in Caffe model zoo as our example tasks to evaluate the effect of our low precision data representation scheme. With the available of local quantization region, we find implementations on top of those schemes could greatly retain the model accuracy, besides the reduction of computational complexity. For example, our 8-bit scheme has no drops on top-1 and top-5 accuracy with 2x speedup on Intel Edison IoT platform. Implementations based on our 4-bit, 2-bit or 1-bit scheme are also applicable to IoT devices with advances of low computational complexity. For example, the drop on our task is only 0.7% when using 2-bit scheme, a scheme which could largely save transistors. Making low-bit scheme usable here opens a new door for further optimization on commodity IoT controller, i.e. extra speed-up could be achieved by replacing multiply-accumulate operations with the proposed table look-up operations. The whole study offers a new approach to relief the challenge of bring advanced deep learning algorithm to resource constrained low-cost IoT device.