Blog
The latest from Google Research
MnasNet: Towards Automating the Design of Mobile Machine Learning Models
Tuesday, August 7, 2018
Posted by Mingxing Tan, Software Engineer, Google Brain Team
Convolutional neural networks
(CNNs) have been widely used in image classification, face recognition, object detection and many other domains. Unfortunately, designing CNNs for mobile devices is challenging because mobile models need to be small and fast, yet still accurate. Although significant effort has been made to design and improve mobile models, such as
MobileNet
and
MobileNetV2
, manually creating efficient models remains challenging when there are so many possibilities to consider. Inspired by recent progress in
AutoML neural architecture search
, we wondered if the design of mobile CNN models could also benefit from an AutoML approach.
In “
MnasNet: Platform-Aware Neural Architecture Search for Mobile
”, we explore an automated neural architecture search approach for designing mobile models using
reinforcement learning
. To deal with mobile speed constraints, we explicitly incorporate the speed information into the main reward function of the search algorithm, so that the search can identify a model that achieves a good trade-off between accuracy and speed. In doing so, MnasNet is able to find models that run 1.5x faster than state-of-the-art hand-crafted
MobileNetV2
and 2.4x faster than
NASNet
, while reaching the same ImageNet top 1 accuracy.
Unlike in previous architecture search approaches, where model speed is considered via another proxy (e.g.,
FLOPS
), our approach directly measures model speed by executing the model on a particular platform, e.g., Pixel phones which were used in this research study. In this way, we can directly measure what is achievable in real-world practice, given that each type of mobile device has its own software and hardware idiosyncrasies and may require different architectures for the best trade-offs between accuracy and speed.
The overall flow of our approach consists mainly of three components: a
RNN
-based controller for learning and sampling model architectures, a trainer that builds and trains models to obtain the accuracy, and an inference engine for measuring the model speed on real mobile phones using
TensorFlow Lite
. We formulate a
multi-objective optimization
problem that aims to achieve both high accuracy and high speed, and utilize a reinforcement learning algorithm with a customized reward function to find
Pareto optimal
solutions (e.g., models that have the highest accuracy without worsening speed).
Overall flow of our automated neural architecture search approach for Mobile.
In order to strike the right balance between search flexibility and search space size, we propose a novel factorized hierarchical search space, which factorizes a convolutional neural network into a sequence of blocks, and then uses a hierarchical search space to determine the layer architecture for each block. In this way, our approach allows different layers to use different operations and connections; Meanwhile, we force all layers in each block to share the same structure, thus significantly reducing the search space size by orders of magnitude compared to a flat per-layer search space.
Our MnasNet network, sampled from the novel factorized hierarchical search space,illustrating the layer diversity throughout the network architecture.
We tested the effectiveness of our approach on
ImageNet
classification and
COCO
object detection. Our experiments achieve a new state-of-the-art accuracy under typical mobile speed constraints. In particular, the figure below shows the results on ImageNet.
ImageNet Accuracy and Inference Latency comparison. MnasNets are our models.
With the same accuracy, our MnasNet model runs 1.5x faster than the hand-crafted state-of-the-art
MobileNetV2
, and 2.4x faster than
NASNet
, which also used architecture search. After applying the
squeeze-and-excitation
optimization, our MnasNet+SE models achieve
ResNet-50
level top-1 accuracy at 76.1%, with 19x fewer parameters and 10x fewer multiply-adds operations. On COCO object detection, our model family achieves both higher accuracy and higher speed than MobileNet, and achieves comparable accuracy to the
SSD300
model with 35x less computation cost.
We are pleased to see that our automated approach can achieve state-of-the-art performance on multiple complex mobile vision tasks. In the future, we plan to incorporate more operations and optimizations into our search space, and apply it to more mobile vision tasks such as semantic segmentation.
Acknowledgements
Special thanks to the co-authors of the paper Bo Chen, Quoc V. Le, Ruoming Pang and Vijay Vasudevan. We’d also like to thank Andrew Howard, Barret Zoph, Dmitry Kalenichenko, Guiheng Zhou, Jeff Dean, Mark Sandler, Megan Kacholia, Sheng Li, Vishy Tirumalashetty, Wen Wang, Xiaoqiang Zheng and Yifeng Lu for their help, and the TensorFlow Lite and Google Brain teams.
Labels
accessibility
ACL
ACM
Acoustic Modeling
Adaptive Data Analysis
ads
adsense
adwords
Africa
AI
AI for Social Good
Algorithms
Android
Android Wear
API
App Engine
App Inventor
April Fools
Art
Audio
Augmented Reality
Australia
Automatic Speech Recognition
AutoML
Awards
BigQuery
Cantonese
Chemistry
China
Chrome
Cloud Computing
Collaboration
Compression
Computational Imaging
Computational Photography
Computer Science
Computer Vision
conference
conferences
Conservation
correlate
Course Builder
crowd-sourcing
CVPR
Data Center
Data Discovery
data science
datasets
Deep Learning
DeepDream
DeepMind
distributed systems
Diversity
Earth Engine
economics
Education
Electronic Commerce and Algorithms
electronics
EMEA
EMNLP
Encryption
entities
Entity Salience
Environment
Europe
Exacycle
Expander
Faculty Institute
Faculty Summit
Flu Trends
Fusion Tables
gamification
Gboard
Gmail
Google Accelerated Science
Google Books
Google Brain
Google Cloud Platform
Google Docs
Google Drive
Google Genomics
Google Maps
Google Photos
Google Play Apps
Google Science Fair
Google Sheets
Google Translate
Google Trips
Google Voice Search
Google+
Government
grants
Graph
Graph Mining
Hardware
HCI
Health
High Dynamic Range Imaging
ICCV
ICLR
ICML
ICSE
Image Annotation
Image Classification
Image Processing
Inbox
India
Information Retrieval
internationalization
Internet of Things
Interspeech
IPython
Journalism
jsm
jsm2011
K-12
Kaggle
KDD
Keyboard Input
Klingon
Korean
Labs
Linear Optimization
localization
Low-Light Photography
Machine Hearing
Machine Intelligence
Machine Learning
Machine Perception
Machine Translation
Magenta
MapReduce
market algorithms
Market Research
materials science
Mixed Reality
ML
ML Fairness
MOOC
Moore's Law
Multimodal Learning
NAACL
Natural Language Processing
Natural Language Understanding
Network Management
Networks
Neural Networks
NeurIPS
Nexus
Ngram
NIPS
NLP
On-device Learning
open source
operating systems
Optical Character Recognition
optimization
osdi
osdi10
patents
Peer Review
ph.d. fellowship
PhD Fellowship
PhotoScan
Physics
PiLab
Pixel
Policy
Professional Development
Proposals
Public Data Explorer
publication
Publications
Quantum AI
Quantum Computing
Recommender Systems
Reinforcement Learning
renewable energy
Research
Research Awards
resource optimization
Responsible AI
Robotics
schema.org
Search
search ads
Security and Privacy
Self-Supervised Learning
Semantic Models
Semi-supervised Learning
SIGCOMM
SIGMOD
Site Reliability Engineering
Social Networks
Software
Sound Search
Speech
Speech Recognition
statistics
Structured Data
Style Transfer
Supervised Learning
Systems
TensorBoard
TensorFlow
TPU
Translate
trends
TTS
TV
UI
University Relations
UNIX
Unsupervised Learning
User Experience
video
Video Analysis
Virtual Reality
Vision Research
Visiting Faculty
Visualization
VLDB
Voice Search
Wiki
wikipedia
WWW
Year in Review
YouTube
Archive
2022
Jun
May
Apr
Mar
Feb
Jan
2021
Dec
Nov
Oct
Sep
Aug
Jul
Jun
May
Apr
Mar
Feb
Jan
2020
Dec
Nov
Oct
Sep
Aug
Jul
Jun
May
Apr
Mar
Feb
Jan
2019
Dec
Nov
Oct
Sep
Aug
Jul
Jun
May
Apr
Mar
Feb
Jan
2018
Dec
Nov
Oct
Sep
Aug
Jul
Jun
May
Apr
Mar
Feb
Jan
2017
Dec
Nov
Oct
Sep
Aug
Jul
Jun
May
Apr
Mar
Feb
Jan
2016
Dec
Nov
Oct
Sep
Aug
Jul
Jun
May
Apr
Mar
Feb
Jan
2015
Dec
Nov
Oct
Sep
Aug
Jul
Jun
May
Apr
Mar
Feb
Jan
2014
Dec
Nov
Oct
Sep
Aug
Jul
Jun
May
Apr
Mar
Feb
Jan
2013
Dec
Nov
Oct
Sep
Aug
Jul
Jun
May
Apr
Mar
Feb
Jan
2012
Dec
Oct
Sep
Aug
Jul
Jun
May
Apr
Mar
Feb
Jan
2011
Dec
Nov
Sep
Aug
Jul
Jun
May
Apr
Mar
Feb
Jan
2010
Dec
Nov
Oct
Sep
Aug
Jul
Jun
May
Apr
Mar
Feb
Jan
2009
Dec
Nov
Aug
Jul
Jun
May
Apr
Mar
Feb
Jan
2008
Dec
Nov
Oct
Sep
Jul
May
Apr
Mar
Feb
2007
Oct
Sep
Aug
Jul
Jun
Feb
2006
Dec
Nov
Sep
Aug
Jul
Jun
Apr
Mar
Feb
Feed
Follow @googleai
Give us feedback in our
Product Forums
.
