A Comprehensive Deep Learning Library Benchmark and Optimal Library Selection

Deploying deep learning (DL) on mobile devices has been a notable trend in recent years. To support fast inference of on-device DL, DL libraries play a critical role as algorithms and hardware do. Unfortunately, no prior work ever dives deep into the ecosystem of modern DL libraries and provides quantitative results on their performance. In this paper, we first build a comprehensive benchmark that includes 6 representative DL libraries and 15 diversified DL models. Then we perform extensive experiments on 10 mobile devices, and the results reveal the current landscape of mobile DL libraries. For example, we find that the best-performing DL library is severely fragmented across different models and hardware, and the gap between DL libraries can be rather huge. In fact, the impacts of DL libraries can overwhelm the optimizations from algorithms or hardware, e.g., model quantization and GPU/DSP-based heterogeneous computing. Motivated by the fragmented performance of DL libraries across models and hardware, we propose an effective DL Library selection framework to obtain the optimal library on a new dataset that has been created. We evaluate the DL Library selection algorithm, and the results show that the framework at it can improve the prediction accuracy by about 10% than benchmark approaches on average.