Neural Architecture Search for Intel Movidius VPU

Abstract: Hardware-aware Neural Architecture Search (NAS) technologies have been proposed to automate and speed up model design to meet both quality and inference efficiency requirements on a given hardware. Prior arts have shown the capability of NAS on hardware specific network design. In this whitepaper, we further extend the use of NAS to Intel Movidius VPU (Vision Processor Units). To determine the hardware-cost to be incorporated into the NAS process, we introduced two methods: pre-collected hardware-cost on device and device-specific hardware-cost model VPUNN. With the help of NAS, for classification task on VPU, we can achieve 1.3x fps acceleration over Mobilenet-v2-1.4 and 2.2x acceleration over Resnet50 with the same accuracy score. For super resolution task on VPU, we can achieve 1.08x PSNR and 6x higher fps compared with EDSR3.