MFAGAN: A Compression Framework for Memory-Efficient On-Device Super-Resolution GAN
This work addresses memory efficiency for on-device super-resolution, enabling deployment on resource-constrained mobile devices, though it is incremental as it builds upon existing GAN compression techniques.
The paper tackles the high memory consumption of GAN-based super-resolution models, which hinders deployment on mobile devices, by proposing MFAGAN, a compression framework that achieves up to 8.3x memory saving and 42.9x computation reduction with minimal visual quality loss.
Generative adversarial networks (GANs) have promoted remarkable advances in single-image super-resolution (SR) by recovering photo-realistic images. However, high memory consumption of GAN-based SR (usually generators) causes performance degradation and more energy consumption, hindering the deployment of GAN-based SR into resource-constricted mobile devices. In this paper, we propose a novel compression framework \textbf{M}ulti-scale \textbf{F}eature \textbf{A}ggregation Net based \textbf{GAN} (MFAGAN) for reducing the memory access cost of the generator. First, to overcome the memory explosion of dense connections, we utilize a memory-efficient multi-scale feature aggregation net as the generator. Second, for faster and more stable training, our method introduces the PatchGAN discriminator. Third, to balance the student discriminator and the compressed generator, we distill both the generator and the discriminator. Finally, we perform a hardware-aware neural architecture search (NAS) to find a specialized SubGenerator for the target mobile phone. Benefiting from these improvements, the proposed MFAGAN achieves up to \textbf{8.3}$\times$ memory saving and \textbf{42.9}$\times$ computation reduction, with only minor visual quality degradation, compared with ESRGAN. Empirical studies also show $\sim$\textbf{70} milliseconds latency on Qualcomm Snapdragon 865 chipset.