Inference latency prediction for CNNs on heterogeneous mobile devices and ML frameworks

Abstract

Due to the proliferation of inference tasks on mobile devices, state-of-the-art neural architectures are typically designed using Neural Architecture Search (NAS) to achieve good tradeoffs between machine learning accuracy and inference latency. While measuring inference latency of a huge set of candidate architectures during NAS is not feasible, latency prediction for mobile devices is challenging, because of hardware heterogeneity, optimizations applied by machine learning frameworks, and diversity of neural architectures. Motivated by these challenges, we first quantitatively assess the characteristics of neural architectures (specifically, convolutional neural networks for image classification), ML frameworks, and mobile devices that have significant effects on inference latency. Based on this assessment, we propose an operation-wise framework which addresses these challenges by developing operation-wise latency predictors and achieves high accuracy in end-to-end latency predictions, as shown by our comprehensive evaluations on multiple mobile devices using multicore CPUs and GPUs. To illustrate that our approach does not require expensive data collection, we also show that accurate predictions can be achieved on real-world neural architectures using only small amounts of profiling data.