Hardware-aware NAS

EndToEnd Multi-trial SPOS Demo

To empower affordable DNN on the edge and mobile devices, hardware-aware NAS searches both high accuracy and low latency models. In particular, the search algorithm only considers the models within the target latency constraints during the search process.

To run this demo, first install nn-Meter from source code (Github repo link: https://github.com/microsoft/nn-Meter. Currently we haven’t released this package, so development installation is required).

python setup.py develop

Then run multi-trail SPOS demo:

python ${NNI_ROOT}/examples/nas/oneshot/spos/multi_trial.py

How the demo works

To support hardware-aware NAS, you first need a Strategy that supports filtering the models by latency. We provide such a filter named LatencyFilter in NNI and initialize a Random strategy with the filter:

simple_strategy = strategy.Random(model_filter=LatencyFilter(threshold=100, predictor=base_predictor))

LatencyFilter will predict the models' latency by using nn-Meter and filter out the models whose latency are larger than the threshold (i.e., 100 in this example). You can also build your own strategies and filters to support more flexible NAS such as sorting the models according to latency.

Then, pass this strategy to RetiariiExperiment:

exp = RetiariiExperiment(base_model, trainer, strategy=simple_strategy)

exp_config = RetiariiExeConfig('local')
...
exp_config.dummy_input = [1, 3, 32, 32]

exp.run(exp_config, port)

In exp_config, dummy_input is required for tracing shape info.