Doubly Nested Network for Resource-Efficient Inference

Abstract: We propose doubly nested network(DNNet) where all neurons represent their own sub-models that solve the same task. Every sub-model is nested both layer-wise and channel-wise. While nesting sub-models layer-wise is straight-forward with deep-supervision as proposed in \cite{xie2015holistically}, channel-wise nesting has not been explored in the literature to our best knowledge. Channel-wise nesting is non-trivial as neurons between consecutive layers are all connected to each other. In this work, we introduce a technique to solve this problem by sorting channels topologically and connecting neurons accordingly. For the purpose, channel-causal convolutions are used. Slicing doubly nested network gives a working sub-network. The most notable application of our proposed network structure with slicing operation is resource-efficient inference. At test time, computing resources such as time and memory available for running the prediction algorithm can significantly vary across devices and applications. Given a budget constraint, we can slice the network accordingly and use a sub-model for inference within budget, requiring no additional computation such as training or fine-tuning after deployment. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach in several practical scenarios of utilizing available resource efficiently.