TinyFormer: Efficient Transformer Design and Deployment on Tiny Devices

Fuente: arXiv
Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Yang, Jianlei, Liao, Jiacheng, Lei, Fanding, Liu, Meichen, Long, Lingkun, Chen, Junyi, Wan, Han, Yu, Bei, Zhao, Weisheng
Format: Preprint
Published: 2023
Subjects:
Online Access:
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866908676789370880
author Yang, Jianlei
Liao, Jiacheng
Lei, Fanding
Liu, Meichen
Long, Lingkun
Chen, Junyi
Wan, Han
Yu, Bei
Zhao, Weisheng
author_facet Yang, Jianlei
Liao, Jiacheng
Lei, Fanding
Liu, Meichen
Long, Lingkun
Chen, Junyi
Wan, Han
Yu, Bei
Zhao, Weisheng
contents Developing deep learning models on tiny devices (e.g. Microcontroller units, MCUs) has attracted much attention in various embedded IoT applications. However, it is challenging to efficiently design and deploy recent advanced models (e.g. transformers) on tiny devices due to their severe hardware resource constraints. In this work, we propose TinyFormer, a framework specifically designed to develop and deploy resource-efficient transformer models on MCUs. TinyFormer consists of SuperNAS, SparseNAS, and SparseEngine. Separately, SuperNAS aims to search for an appropriate supernet from a vast search space. SparseNAS evaluates the best sparse single-path transformer model from the identified supernet. Finally, SparseEngine efficiently deploys the searched sparse models onto MCUs. To the best of our knowledge, SparseEngine is the first deployment framework capable of performing inference of sparse transformer models on MCUs. Evaluation results on the CIFAR-10 dataset demonstrate that TinyFormer can design efficient transformers with an accuracy of 96.1% while adhering to hardware constraints of 1MB storage and 320KB memory. Additionally, TinyFormer achieves significant speedups in sparse inference, up to 12.2x comparing to the CMSIS-NN library. TinyFormer is believed to bring powerful transformers into TinyML scenarios and to greatly expand the scope of deep learning applications
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2311_01759
institution arXiv
publishDate 2023
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle TinyFormer: Efficient Transformer Design and Deployment on Tiny Devices
Yang, Jianlei
Liao, Jiacheng
Lei, Fanding
Liu, Meichen
Long, Lingkun
Chen, Junyi
Wan, Han
Yu, Bei
Zhao, Weisheng
Machine Learning
Hardware Architecture
Developing deep learning models on tiny devices (e.g. Microcontroller units, MCUs) has attracted much attention in various embedded IoT applications. However, it is challenging to efficiently design and deploy recent advanced models (e.g. transformers) on tiny devices due to their severe hardware resource constraints. In this work, we propose TinyFormer, a framework specifically designed to develop and deploy resource-efficient transformer models on MCUs. TinyFormer consists of SuperNAS, SparseNAS, and SparseEngine. Separately, SuperNAS aims to search for an appropriate supernet from a vast search space. SparseNAS evaluates the best sparse single-path transformer model from the identified supernet. Finally, SparseEngine efficiently deploys the searched sparse models onto MCUs. To the best of our knowledge, SparseEngine is the first deployment framework capable of performing inference of sparse transformer models on MCUs. Evaluation results on the CIFAR-10 dataset demonstrate that TinyFormer can design efficient transformers with an accuracy of 96.1% while adhering to hardware constraints of 1MB storage and 320KB memory. Additionally, TinyFormer achieves significant speedups in sparse inference, up to 12.2x comparing to the CMSIS-NN library. TinyFormer is believed to bring powerful transformers into TinyML scenarios and to greatly expand the scope of deep learning applications
title TinyFormer: Efficient Transformer Design and Deployment on Tiny Devices
topic Machine Learning
Hardware Architecture
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2311.01759