Platform-Aware Neural Architecture Search for Mobile

Designing convolutional neural networks (CNN) models for mobile devices is challenging because mobile models need to be small and fast, yet still accurate. Although significant effort has been dedicated to design and improve mobile models on all three dimensions, it is challenging to manually balance these trade-offs when there are so many architectural possibilities to consider. In this paper, we propose an automated neural architecture search approach for designing resource-constrained mobile CNN models. We propose to explicitly incorporate latency information into the main objective so that the search can identify a model that achieves a good trade-off between accuracy and latency. Unlike in previous work, where mobile latency is considered via another, often inaccurate proxy (eg, FLOPS), in our experiments, we directly measure real-world inference latency by executing the model on a particular …