Enabling Efficient Deep Learning on MCU With Transient Redundancy Elimination

Deploying deep neural networks (DNNs) with satisfactory performance in resource-constrained environments is challenging. This is especially true of microcontrollers due to their tight space and computational capabilities. However, there is a growing demand for DNNs on microcontrollers, as executing large DNNs on microcontrollers is critical to reducing energy consumption, increasing performance efficiency, and eliminating privacy concerns. This paper presents a novel and systematic data redundancy elimination method to implement efficient DNNs on microcontrollers through innovations in computation and space optimization. By making the optimization itself a trainable component in the target neural networks, this method maximizes performance benefits while keeping the DNN accuracy stable. Experiments are performed on two microcontroller boards with three popular DNNs, namely CifarNet, ZfNet and SqueezeNet. Experiments show that this solution eliminates more than 96% of computations in DNNs and makes them fit well on microcontrollers, yielding 3.4-5 $\times$ speedup with little loss of accuracy.