Designing Adaptive Neural Networks for Energy-Constrained Image Classification

As convolutional neural networks (CNNs) enable state-of-the-art computer vision applications, their high energy consumption has emerged as a key impediment to their deployment on embedded and mobile devices. Towards efficient image classification under hardware constraints, prior work has proposed adaptive CNNs, i.e., systems of networks with different accuracy and computation characteristics, where a selection scheme adaptively selects the network to be evaluated for each input image. While previous efforts have investigated different network selection schemes, we find that they do not necessarily result in energy savings when deployed on mobile systems. The key limitation of existing methods is that they learn only how data should be processed among the CNNs and not the network architectures, with each network being treated as a blackbox. To address this limitation, we pursue a more powerful design paradigm where the architecture settings of the CNNs are treated as hyper-parameters to be globally optimized. We cast the design of adaptive CNNs as a hyper-parameter optimization problem with respect to energy, accuracy, and communication constraints imposed by the mobile device. To efficiently solve this problem, we adapt Bayesian optimization to the properties of the design space, reaching near-optimal configurations in few tens of function evaluations. Our method reduces the energy consumed for image classification on a mobile device by up to 6×, compared to the best previously published work that uses CNNs as blackboxes. Finally, we evaluate two image classification practices, i.e., classifying all images locally versus over the cloud under energy and communication constraints.