Industry Expert Blogs
Efficient inference on IMG Series4 NNAsWith Imagination Blog - Sergei Chirkunov, ImaginationFeb. 06, 2023 |
Research into neural network architectures generally prioritises accuracy over efficiency. Certain papers have investigated efficiency (Tan and Le 2020) (Sandler, et al. 2018), but quite often this is with CPU- or GPU-based rather than accelerator-based inference in mind.
In this original work from Imagination’s AI Research team, many well-known classification networks trained on ImageNet are evaluated. We are not interested in accuracy or cost in their own right, but rather in efficiency, which is a combination of the two. In other words, we want networks that get high accuracy on our IMG Series4 NNAs at as low a cost as possible. We cover:
- identifying ImageNet classification network architectures that give the best accuracy/performance trade-offs on our Series4 NNAs.
- reducing cost dramatically using quantisation-aware training (QAT) and low-precision weights without affecting accuracy.