Moccasin: Efficient Tensor Rematerialization for Neural Networks

Abstract: The deployment and training of neural networks on edge computing devices pose many challenges. The low memory nature of edge devices is often one of the biggest limiting factors encountered in the deployment of large neural network models. Tensor rematerialization or recompute is a way to address high memory requirements for neural network training and inference. In this paper we consider the problem of execution time minimization of compute graphs subject to a memory budget. In particular, we develop a new constraint programming formulation called \textsc{Moccasin} with only $O(n)$ integer variables, where $n$ is the number of nodes in the compute graph. This is a significant improvement over the works in the recent literature that propose formulations with $O(n^2)$ Boolean variables. We present numerical studies that show that our approach is up to an order of magnitude faster than recent work especially for large-scale graphs.