Title
MEST: Accurate and Fast Memory-Economic Sparse Training Framework on the Edge.
Abstract
Recently, a new trend of exploring sparsity for accelerating neural network training has emerged, embracing the paradigm of training on the edge. This paper proposes a novel Memory-Economic Sparse Training (MEST) framework targeting for accurate and fast execution on edge devices. The proposed MEST framework consists of enhancements by Elastic Mutation (EM) and Soft Memory Bound (&S) that ensure superior accuracy at high sparsity ratios. Different from the existing works for sparse training, this current work reveals the importance of sparsity schemes on the performance of sparse training in terms of accuracy as well as training speed on real edge devices. On top of that, the paper proposes to employ data efficiency for further acceleration of sparse training. Our results suggest that unforgettable examples can be identified in-situ even during the dynamic exploration of sparsity masks in the sparse training process, and therefore can be removed for further training speedup on edge devices. Comparing with state-of-the-art (SOTA) works on accuracy, our MEST increases Top-1 accuracy significantly on ImageNet when using the same unstructured sparsity scheme. Systematical evaluation on accuracy, training speed, and memory footprint are conducted, where the proposed MEST framework consistently outperforms representative SOTA works. A reviewer strongly against our work based on his false assumptions and misunderstandings. On top of the previous submission, we employ data efficiency for further acceleration of sparse training. And we explore the impact of model sparsity, sparsity schemes, and sparse training algorithms on the number of removable training examples. Our codes are publicly available at: https://github.com/boone891214/MEST.
Year
Venue
DocType
2021
Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems
Conference
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
0
0.34
0
Authors
16
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Geng Yuan193.80
Xiaolong Ma2225.90
Wei Niu32411.21
Zhengang Li4157.27
Zhenglun Kong542.77
Ning Liu6153.59
Yifan Gong71332135.58
Zhan Zheng854.59
Chaoyang He900.68
Qing Jin1022.11
Siyue Wang11213.78
Minghai Qin1201.69
Bin Ren138218.03
Yanzhi Wang141082136.11
Sijia Liu1518142.37
Xue Lin1601.69