Speed up Masked Model

This feature is still in Alpha version.

Introduction

Pruning algorithms usually use weight masks to simulate the real pruning. Masks can be used to check model performance of a specific pruning (or sparsity), but there is no real speedup. Since model speedup is the ultimate goal of model pruning, we try to provide a tool to users to convert a model to a smaller one based on user provided masks (the masks come from the pruning algorithms).

There are two types of pruning. One is fine-grained pruning, it does not change the shape of weights, and input/output tensors. Sparse kernel is required to speed up a fine-grained pruned layer. The other is coarse-grained pruning (e.g., channels), shape of weights and input/output tensors usually change due to such pruning. To speed up this kind of pruning, there is no need to use sparse kernel, just replace the pruned layer with smaller one. Since the support of sparse kernels in community is limited, we only support the speedup of coarse-grained pruning and leave the support of fine-grained pruning in future.

Design and Implementation

To speed up a model, the pruned layers should be replaced, either replaced with smaller layer for coarse-grained mask, or replaced with sparse kernel for fine-grained mask. Coarse-grained mask usually changes the shape of weights or input/output tensors, thus, we should do shape inference to check are there other unpruned layers should be replaced as well due to shape change. Therefore, in our design, there are two main steps: first, do shape inference to find out all the modules that should be replaced; second, replace the modules. The first step requires topology (i.e., connections) of the model, we use jit.trace to obtain the model graph for PyTorch.

For each module, we should prepare four functions, three for shape inference and one for module replacement. The three shape inference functions are: given weight shape infer input/output shape, given input shape infer weight/output shape, given output shape infer weight/input shape. The module replacement function returns a newly created module which is smaller.

Usage

from nni.compression.speedup.torch import ModelSpeedup
# model: the model you want to speed up
# dummy_input: dummy input of the model, given to `jit.trace`
# masks_file: the mask file created by pruning algorithms
m_speedup = ModelSpeedup(model, dummy_input.to(device), masks_file)
m_speedup.speedup_model()
dummy_input = dummy_input.to(device)
start = time.time()
out = model(dummy_input)
print('elapsed time: ', time.time() - start)

For complete examples please refer to the code

NOTE: The current implementation supports PyTorch 1.3.1 or newer.

Limitations

Since every module requires four functions for shape inference and module replacement, this is a large amount of work, we only implemented the ones that are required by the examples. If you want to speed up your own model which cannot supported by the current implementation, you are welcome to contribute.

For PyTorch we can only replace modules, if functions in forward should be replaced, our current implementation does not work. One workaround is make the function a PyTorch module.

Speedup Results of Examples

The code of these experiments can be found here.

slim pruner example

on one V100 GPU, input tensor: torch.randn(64, 3, 32, 32)

Times Mask Latency Speedup Latency
1 0.01197 0.005107
2 0.02019 0.008769
4 0.02733 0.014809
8 0.04310 0.027441
16 0.07731 0.05008
32 0.14464 0.10027

fpgm pruner example

on cpu, input tensor: torch.randn(64, 1, 28, 28), too large variance

Times Mask Latency Speedup Latency
1 0.01383 0.01839
2 0.01167 0.003558
4 0.01636 0.01088
40 0.14412 0.08268
40 1.29385 0.14408
40 0.41035 0.46162
400 6.29020 5.82143

l1filter pruner example

on one V100 GPU, input tensor: torch.randn(64, 3, 32, 32)

Times Mask Latency Speedup Latency
1 0.01026 0.003677
2 0.01657 0.008161
4 0.02458 0.020018
8 0.03498 0.025504
16 0.06757 0.047523
32 0.10487 0.086442

APoZ pruner example

on one V100 GPU, input tensor: torch.randn(64, 3, 32, 32)

Times Mask Latency Speedup Latency
1 0.01389 0.004208
2 0.01628 0.008310
4 0.02521 0.014008
8 0.03386 0.023923
16 0.06042 0.046183
32 0.12421 0.087113