AdaSpring: Context-adaptive and Runtime-evolutionary Deep Model Compression for Mobile Applications

There are many deep learning (e.g. DNN) powered mobile and wearable applications today continuously and unobtrusively sensing the ambient surroundings to enhance all aspects of human lives. To enable robust and private mobile sensing, DNN tends to be deployed locally on the resource-constrained mobile devices via model compression. The current practice either hand-crafted DNN compression techniques, i.e., for optimizing DNN-relative performance (e.g. parameter size), or on-demand DNN compression methods, i.e., for optimizing hardware-dependent metrics (e.g. latency), cannot be locally online because they require offline retraining to ensure accuracy. Also, none of them have correlated their efforts with runtime adaptive compression to consider the dynamic nature of deployment context of mobile applications. To address those challenges, we present AdaSpring, a context-adaptive and self-evolutionary DNN compression framework. It enables the runtime adaptive DNN compression locally online. Specifically, it presents the ensemble training of a retraining-free and self-evolutionary network to integrate multiple alternative DNN compression configurations (i.e., compressed architectures and weights). It then introduces the runtime search strategy to quickly search for the most suitable compression configurations and evolve the corresponding weights. With evaluation on five tasks across three platforms and a real-world case study, experiment outcomes show that AdaSpring obtains up to 3.1x latency reduction, 4.2x energy efficiency improvement in DNNs, compared to hand-crafted compression techniques, while only incurring ≤ 6.2ms runtime-evolution latency.