ADONN: Adaptive Design of Optimized Deep Neural Networks for Embedded Systems

Nowadays, many modern applications, e.g. autonomous system, and cloud data services need to capture and process a big amount of raw data at runtime, that ultimately necessitates a high-performance computing model. Deep Neural Network (DNN) has already revealed its learning capabilities in runtime data processing for modern applications. However, DNNs are becoming more deep sophisticated models for gaining higher accuracy which require a remarkable computing capacity. Considering high-performance cloud infrastructure as a supplier of required computational throughput is often not feasible. Instead, we intend to find a near-sensor processing solution which will lower the need for network bandwidth and increase privacy and power efficiency, as well as guaranteeing worst-case response-times. Toward this goal, we introduce ADONN framework, which aims to automatically design a highly robust DNN architecture for embedded devices as the closest processing unit to the sensors. ADONN adroitly searches the design space to find improved neural architectures. Our proposed framework takes advantage of a multi-objective evolutionary approach, which exploits a pruned design space inspired by a dense architecture. Unlike recent works that mainly have tried to generate highly accurate networks, ADONN also considers the network size factor as the second objective to build a highly optimized network fitting with limited computational resource budgets while delivers comparable accuracy level. In comparison with the best result on CIFAR-10 dataset, a generated network by ADONN presents up to 26.4 compression rate while loses only 4% accuracy. In addition, ADONN maps the generated DNN on the commodity programmable devices including ARM Processor, Hiph-Performance CPU, GPU, and FPGA.