Fast Hardware-Aware Neural Architecture Search

Designing accurate and efficient convolutional neural architectures for vast amount of hardware is challenging because hardware designs are complex and diverse. This paper addresses the hardware diversity challenge in Neural Architecture Search (NAS). Unlike previous approaches that apply search algorithms on a small, human-designed search space without considering hardware diversity, we propose HURRICANE that explores the automatic hardware-aware search over a much larger search space and a two-stage search algorithm, to efficiently generate tailored models for different types of hardware. Extensive experiments on ImageNet demonstrate that our algorithm outperforms state-of-the-art hardware-aware NAS methods under the same latency constraint on three types of hardware. Moreover, the discovered architectures achieve much lower latency and higher accuracy than current state-of-the-art efficient models. Remarkably, HURRICANE achieves a 76.67% top-1 accuracy on ImageNet with a inference latency of only 16.5 ms for DSP, which is a 3.47% higher accuracy and a 6.35× inference speedup than FBNet-iPhoneX, respectively. For VPU, we achieve a 0.53% higher top-1 accuracy than Proxyless-mobile with a 1.49× speedup. Even for well-studied mobile CPU, we achieve a 1.63% higher top-1 accuracy than FBNet-iPhoneX with a comparable inference latency. HURRICANE also reduces the training time by 30.4% compared to SPOS.