Towards Efficient Compact Network Training on Edge-Devices

Currently, there is a trend to deploy training on edge devices, which is crucial to future AI applications in various scenarios with transfer and online learning demands. Specifically, there may be a severe degradation of accuracy when directly deploying the trained models on edge devices, because the local environment forms an edge local dataset that is often different from the generic dataset. However, training on edge devices with limited computing and memory capability is a challenge problem. In this paper, we propose a novel quantization training framework for efficient compact network training on edge devices. Firstly, training-aware symmetric quantization is introduced to quantize all of the data types in the training process. Then, channel-wise quantization method is adopted for comapact network quantization, which has significantly high tolerance to quantization errors and can make the training process more stable. For further efficient training, we build a hardware evaluation platform to evaluate different settings of the network, so as to achieve a better trade-off among accuracy, energy and latency. Finally, we evaluate two widely used compact networks on a domain adaptation dataset for image classification, and the results demonstrate that the proposed methods can allow us achieve an improvement of 8.4 × -17.2× in energy reduction and 11.9 × -16.3× in latency reduction compared with 32-bit implementations, while maintaining the classification accuracy.