An Experimental Perspective for Computation-Efficient Neural Networks Training.

Nowadays, as the tremendous requirements of computation-efficient neural networks to deploy deep learning models on inexpensive and broadly-used devices, many lightweight networks have been presented, such as MobileNet series, ShuffleNet, etc. The computation-efficient models are specifically designed for very limited computational budget, e.g., 10-150 MFLOPs, and can run efficiently on ARM-based devices. These models have smaller CMR than the large networks, such as VGG, ResNet, Inception, etc. However, it is quite efficient for inference on ARM, how about inference or training on GPU? Unfortunately, compact models usually cannot make full utilization of GPU, though it is fast for its small size. In this paper, we will present a series of extensive experiments on the training of compact models, including training on single host, with GPU and CPU, and distributed environment. Then we give some analysis and suggestions on the training.