EDBT 2026 Demo / reviewers in the wild / expert
Wei Niu 0002
dblp:68/828-2
· DBLP profile ↗
57ranked-venue papers
10as first author
50since 2021 · last 2026
0000-0002-2697-7042ORCID · verified
Domains — the database's venue-derived domains; a paper can count in several
Artificial intelligence and machine learning · 30 · 4 first-author · 27 since 2021Graphics, computer vision, multimedia, augmented reality and games · 23 · 3 first-author · 20 since 2021Systems, architecture and hardware · 21 · 5 first-author · 18 since 2021Software engineering, systems software and programming languages · 5 · 4 first-author · 4 since 2021Computer networks · 2 · 1 since 2021Security and privacy · 1 · 1 since 2021Applied, interdisciplinary, general and emerging computing · 1 · 1 since 2021
| Year | Publication | Venue | Position |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2026 | FlashMem: Supporting Modern DNN Workloads on Mobile with GPU Memory Hierarchy OptimizationsabstractThe increasing size and complexity of modern deep neural networks (DNNs) pose significant challenges for on-device inference on mobile GPUs, with limited memory and computational resources. Existing DNN acceleration frameworks primarily deploy a weight preloading strategy, where all model parameters are loaded into memory before execution on mobile GPUs. We posit that this approach is not adequate for modern DNN workloads that comprise very large model(s) and possibly execution of several distinct models in succession. In this work, we introduce FlashMem, a memory streaming framework designed to efficiently execute large-scale modern DNNs and multi-DNN workloads while minimizing memory consumption and reducing inference latency. Instead of fully preloading weights, FlashMem statically determines model loading schedules and dynamically streams them on demand, leveraging 2.5D texture memory to minimize data transformations and improve execution efficiency. Experimental results on 11 models demonstrate that FlashMem achieves 2.0× to 8.4× memory reduction and 1.7× to 75.0× speedup compared to existing frameworks, enabling efficient execution of large-scale models and multi-DNN support on resource-constrained mobile GPUs. Zhihao Shu, Md. Musfiqur Rahman Sanim, Hangyu Zheng, Kunxiong Zhu, Miao Yin, Gagan Agrawal, Wei Niu 0002 |
ASPLOS (2) | 7 |
| 2026 | FBLayout: Optimizing Memory Layout for Efficient LLM Finetuning on Mobile GPUsabstractTransformer-based models have enabled unprecedented capabilities across language, vision, and multimodal tasks. On-device fine-tuning of transformer models offers a privacy-preserving path to personalized AI, yet remains inefficient on mobile GPUs due to severe memory constraints and frequent layout transformations in attention mechanism during training. Existing mobile training frameworks either use unified layouts for forward and backward passes - leading to fragmented memory access and poor GPU utilization during backpropagation - or rely on explicit layout conversions, which introduce significant transformation overhead.To overcome this, we propose FBLayout, a layout-aware framework that co-designs tensor organization with mobile GPU platforms. FBLayout introduces: (1) a unified R-Tile layout for multidimensional reductions across forward/backward passes; (2) tile-based index transformation to eliminate physical data movement; and (3) activation-guided layout selection to propagate efficient layouts globally. Evaluations on seven transformer models across different mobile phones (including ARM Mali and Qualcomm Adreno GPUs) show that FBLayout achieves 2.2-5.7× speedup over MNN, TFLite, and TVM, while significantly improving cache efficiency and reducing memory footprint, enabling practical on-device large model fine-tuning. Kahou Tam, Wei Niu 0002, Xiaomin Ouyang, Cheng-Zhong Xu 0001, Li Li 0064 |
MobiSys | 2 |
| 2026 | MetaBreak: Jailbreaking Online LLM Services via Special Token ManipulationabstractUnlike regular tokens derived from existing text corpora, special tokens are artificially created to annotate structured conversations during the fine-tuning process of Large Language Models (LLMs). Serving as metadata of training data, these tokens play a crucial role in instructing LLMs to generate coherent and context-aware responses. We demonstrate that special tokens can be exploited to construct four attack primitives, with which malicious users can reliably bypass the internal safety alignment of online LLM services and circumvent state-of-the-art (SOTA) external content moderation systems simultaneously. Moreover, we found that addressing this threat is challenging, as aggressive defense mechanisms-such as input sanitization by removing special tokens entirely, as suggested in academia-are less effective than anticipated. This is because such defense can be evaded when the special tokens are replaced by regular ones with high semantic similarity within the tokenizer's embedding space. We systemically evaluated our method, named MetaBreak, on both lab environment and commercial LLM platforms. Our approach achieves jailbreak rates comparable to SOTA prompt-engineering-based solutions when no content moderation is deployed. However, when there is content moderation, MetaBreak outperforms SOTA solutions PAP and GPTFuzzer by 11.6% and 34.8%, respectively. Finally, since MetaBreak employs a fundamentally different strategy from prompt engineering, the two approaches can work synergistically. Notably, empowering MetaBreak on PAP and GPTFuzzer boosts jailbreak rates by 24.3% and 20.2%, respectively. Wentian Zhu, Zhen Xiang, Wei Niu 0002, Le Guan |
SP | 3 |
| 2025 | Optimizing 3D Gaussian Splattering for Mobile GPUsabstractImage-based 3D scene reconstruction, which transforms multi-view images into a structured 3D representation of the surrounding environment, is a common task across many modern applications. 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) is a new paradigm to address this problem and offers considerable efficiency as compared to the previous methods. Motivated by this, and considering various benefits of mobile device deployment (data privacy, operating without internet connectivity, and potentially faster responses), this paper develops Texture3dgs, an optimized mapping of 3DGS for a mobile GPU. A critical challenge in this area turns out to be optimizing for the twodimensional (2D) texture cache, which needs to be exploited for faster executions on mobile GPUs. As a sorting method dominates the computations in 3DGS on mobile platforms, the core of Texture3dgs is a novel sorting algorithm where the processing, data movement, and placement are highly optimized for 2D memory. The properties of this algorithm are analyzed in view of a cost model for the texture cache. In addition, we accelerate other steps of the 3DGS algorithm through improved variable layout design and other optimizations. End-to-end evaluation shows that Texture 3 dgs delivers up to $\mathbf{4. 1} \times$ and $\mathbf{1. 7} \times$ speedup for the sorting and overall 3D scene reconstruction, respectively while also reducing memory usage by up to $1.6 \times-$ demonstrating the effectiveness of our design for efficient mobile 3D scene reconstruction. Md. Musfiqur Rahman Sanim, Zhihao Shu, Bahram Afsharmanesh, AmirAli Mirian, Jiexiong Guan, Wei Niu 0002, Bin Ren 0002, Gagan Agrawal |
PACT | 6 |
| 2025 | Toward Adaptive Large Language Models Structured Pruning via Hybrid-grained Weight Importance AssessmentabstractStructured pruning for large language models (LLMs) has garnered significant academic interest due to its ability to efficiently compress and accelerate LLMs by eliminating redundant weight groups at a coarse-grained granularity. Current structured pruning methods for LLMs typically depend on a singular granularity for assessing weight importance, resulting in notable performance degradation in downstream tasks. Intriguingly, our empirical investigations reveal that utilizing unstructured pruning, which achieves better performance retention by pruning weights at a finer granularity, \emph{i.e.}, individual weights, yields significantly varied sparse LLM structures when juxtaposed to structured pruning. This suggests that evaluating both holistic and individual assessments for weight importance are essential for LLM pruning. Building on this insight, we introduce the Hybrid-grained Weight Importance Assessment (HyWIA), a novel method that merges fine-grained and coarse-grained evaluations of weight importance for the pruning of LLMs. Leveraging an attention mechanism, HyWIA adaptively determines the optimal blend of granularity in weight importance assessments in an end-to-end pruning manner. Extensive experiments on LLaMA-V1/V2, Vicuna, Baichuan, and Bloom across various benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of HyWIA in pruning LLMs. For example, HyWIA surpasses the cutting-edge LLM-Pruner by an average margin of 2.82% in accuracy across seven downstream tasks when pruning LLaMA-7B by 50%. Jun Liu 0075, Zhenglun Kong, Pu Zhao 0001, Changdi Yang, Xuan Shen, Hao Tang 0005, Geng Yuan, Wei Niu 0002, Wenbin Zhang 0002, Xue Lin 0001, Yanzhi Wang 0001 |
AAAI | 8 |
| 2025 | LazyDiT: Lazy Learning for the Acceleration of Diffusion TransformersabstractDiffusion Transformers have emerged as the preeminent models for a wide array of generative tasks, demonstrating superior performance and efficacy across various applications. The promising results come at the cost of slow inference, as each denoising step requires running the whole transformer model with a large amount of parameters. In this paper, we show that performing the full computation of the model at each diffusion step is unnecessary, as some computations can be skipped by lazily reusing the results of previous steps. Furthermore, we show that the lower bound of similarity between outputs at consecutive steps is notably high, and this similarity can be linearly approximated using the inputs. To verify our demonstrations, we propose the **LazyDiT**, a lazy learning framework that efficiently leverages cached results from earlier steps to skip redundant computations. Specifically, we incorporate lazy learning layers into the model, effectively trained to maximize laziness, enabling dynamic skipping of redundant computations. Experimental results show that LazyDiT outperforms the DDIM sampler across multiple diffusion transformer models at various resolutions. Furthermore, we implement our method on mobile devices, achieving better performance than DDIM with similar latency. Xuan Shen, Zhao Song 0002, Yufa Zhou 0001, Bo Chen 0029, Yanyu Li, Yifan Gong 0004, Kai Zhang 0045, Hao Tan 0002, Jason Kuen, Henghui Ding, Zhihao Shu, Wei Niu 0002, Pu Zhao 0001, Yanzhi Wang 0001, Jiuxiang Gu |
AAAI | 12 |
| 2025 | AdaCM^2: On Understanding Extremely Long-Term Video with Adaptive Cross-Modality Memory ReductionabstractThe advancements in large language models (LLMs) have propelled the improvement of video understanding tasks by incorporating LLMs with visual models. However, most existing LLM-based models (e.g., VideoLLaMA, VideoChat) are constrained to processing short-duration videos. Recent attempts to understand long-term videos by extracting and compressing visual features into a fixed memory size. Nevertheless, those methods leverage only visual modality to merge video tokens and overlook the correlation between visual and textual queries, leading to difficulties in effectively handling complex question-answering tasks. To address the challenges of long videos and complex prompts, we propose AdaCM2, which, for the first time, introduces an adaptive cross-modality memory reduction approach to video-text alignment in an auto-regressive manner on video streams. Our extensive experiments on various video understanding tasks, such as video captioning, video question answering, and video classification, demonstrate that AdaCM2achieves state-of-the-art performance across multiple datasets while significantly reducing memory usage. Notably, it achieves a 4.5% improvement across multiple tasks in the LVU dataset with a GPU memory consumption reduction of up to 65%. Yuanbin Man, Ying Huang 0008, Chengming Zhang 0006, Bingzhe Li, Wei Niu 0002, Miao Yin |
CVPR | 5 |
| 2025 | QuartDepth: Post-Training Quantization for Real-Time Depth Estimation on the EdgeabstractMonocular Depth Estimation (MDE) has emerged as a pivotal task in computer vision, supporting numerous real-world applications. However, deploying accurate depth estimation models on resource-limited edge devices, especially Application-Specific Integrated Circuits (ASICs), is challenging due to the high computational and memory demands. Recent advancements in foundational depth estimation deliver impressive results but further amplify the difficulty of deployment on ASICs. To address this, we propose Quart-Depth which adopts post-training quantization to quantize MDE models with hardware accelerations for ASICs. Our approach involves quantizing both weights and activations to 4-bit precision, reducing the model size and computation cost. To mitigate the performance degradation, we introduce activation polishing and compensation algorithm applied before and after activation quantization, as well as a weight reconstruction method for minimizing errors in weight quantization. Furthermore, we design a flexible and programmable hardware accelerator by supporting kernel fusion and customized instruction programmability, enhancing throughput and efficiency. Experimental results demonstrate that our framework achieves competitive accuracy while enabling fast inference and higher energy efficiency on ASICs, bridging the gap between high-performance depth estimation and practical edge-device applicability. Code: https://github.com/shawnricecake/quart-depth Xuan Shen, Weize Ma, Jing Liu 0001, Changdi Yang, Quanyi Wang, Henghui Ding, Wei Niu 0002, Yanzhi Wang 0001, Pu Zhao 0001, Jiuxiang Gu |
CVPR | 8 |
| 2025 | GaussianSpa: An "Optimizing-Sparsifying" Simplification Framework for Compact and High-Quality 3D Gaussian Splattingabstract3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) has emerged as a mainstream for novel view synthesis, leveraging continuous aggregations of Gaussian functions to model scene geometry. However, 3DGS suffers from substantial memory requirements to store the large amount of Gaussians, hindering its efficiency and practicality. To address this challenge, we introduce GaussianSpa, an optimization-based simplification framework for compact and high-quality 3DGS. Specifically, we formulate the simplification objective as a constrained optimization problem associated with the 3DGS training. Correspondingly, we propose an efficient "optimizing-sparsifying" solution for the formulated problem, alternately solving two independent sub-problems and gradually imposing substantial sparsity onto the Gaussians in the 3DGS training process. We conduct quantitative and qualitative evaluations on various datasets, demonstrating the superiority of GaussianSpa over existing state-of-the-art approaches. Notably, GaussianSpa achieves an average PSNR improvement of 0.9 dB on the real-world Deep Blending dataset with 10× fewer Gaussians compared to the vanilla 3DGS. Our project page is available at https://noodle-lab.github.io/gaussianspa. Yangming Zhang 0001, Wenqi Jia 0003, Wei Niu 0002, Miao Yin |
CVPR | 3 |
| 2025 | RoRA: Efficient Fine-Tuning of LLM with Reliability Optimization for Rank AdaptationabstractFine-tuning helps large language models (LLM) recover degraded information and enhance task performance. Although Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) is widely used and effective for fine-tuning, we have observed that its scaling factor can limit or even reduce performance as the rank size increases. To address this issue, we propose RoRA (Rank-adaptive Reliability Optimization), a simple yet effective method for optimizing LoRA’s scaling factor. By replacing α/r with $\alpha /\sqrt r $, RoRA ensures improved performance as rank size increases. Moreover, RoRA enhances low-rank adaptation in fine-tuning uncompressed models and excels in the more challenging task of accuracy recovery when fine-tuning pruned models. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of RoRA in fine-tuning both uncompressed and pruned models. RoRA surpasses the state-of-the-art (SOTA) in average accuracy and robustness on LLaMA-7B/13B, LLaMA2-7B, and LLaMA3-8B, specifically outperforming LoRA and DoRA by 6.5% and 2.9% on LLaMA-7B, respectively. In pruned model fine-tuning, RoRA shows significant advantages; for SHEARED-LLAMA-1.3, a LLaMA-7B with 81.4% pruning, RoRA achieves 5.7% higher average accuracy than LoRA and 3.9% higher than DoRA. Jun Liu 0075, Zhenglun Kong, Peiyan Dong, Xuan Shen, Pu Zhao 0001, Hao Tang 0005, Geng Yuan, Wei Niu 0002, Wenbin Zhang 0002, Xue Lin 0001, Yanzhi Wang 0001 |
ICASSP | 8 |
| 2025 | Sparse Learning for State Space Models on MobileabstractTransformer models have been widely investigated in different domains by providing long-range dependency handling and global contextual awareness, driving the development of popular AI applications such as ChatGPT, Gemini, and Alexa.
State Space Models (SSMs) have emerged as strong contenders in the field of sequential modeling, challenging the dominance of Transformers. SSMs incorporate a selective mechanism that allows for dynamic parameter adjustment based on input data, enhancing their performance.
However, this mechanism also comes with increasing computational complexity and bandwidth demands, posing challenges for deployment on resource-constraint mobile devices.
To address these challenges without sacrificing the accuracy of the selective mechanism, we propose a sparse learning framework that integrates architecture-aware compiler optimizations. We introduce an end-to-end solution--$\mathbf{C}_4^n$ kernel sparsity, which prunes $n$ elements from every four contiguous weights, and develop a compiler-based acceleration solution to ensure execution efficiency for this sparsity on mobile devices.
Based on the kernel sparsity, our framework generates optimized sparse models targeting specific sparsity or latency requirements for various model sizes. We further leverage pruned weights to compensate for the remaining weights, enhancing downstream task performance.
For practical hardware acceleration, we propose $\mathbf{C}_4^n$-specific optimizations combined with a layout transformation elimination strategy.
This approach mitigates inefficiencies arising from fine-grained pruning in linear layers and improves performance across other operations.
Experimental results demonstrate that our method achieves superior task performance compared to other semi-structured pruning methods and achieves up-to 7$\times$ speedup compared to llama.cpp framework on mobile devices. Xuan Shen, Hangyu Zheng, Yifan Gong 0004, Zhenglun Kong, Changdi Yang, Zheng Zhan 0001, Yushu Wu, Xue Lin 0001, Yanzhi Wang 0001, Pu Zhao 0001, Wei Niu 0002 |
ICLR | 11 |
| 2025 | NeurLZ: An Online Neural Learning-based Method to Enhance Scientific Lossy CompressionabstractSZ3 (0.07MB, PSNR = 29.2) (c)NeurLZ (0.07MB, PSNR = 39.1) Wenqi Jia 0003, Zhewen Hu, Youyuan Liu, Boyuan Zhang 0002, Jinzhen Wang, Jinyang Liu 0003, Wei Niu 0002, Stavros Kalafatis, Junzhou Huang, Sian Jin, Daoce Wang, Jiannan Tian, Miao Yin |
ICS | 7 |
| 2025 | Towards Recognizing Food Types for Unseen SubjectsabstractRecognizing food types through sensor signals for unseen users remains remarkably challenging despite extensive recent studies. The efficacy of prior machine learning techniques is dwarfed by giant variations of data collected from multiple participants, partly because users have varied chewing habits and wear sensor devices in various manners. This work treats the problem as an instance of the domain adaptation problem, where each user represents a domain. We develop the first multi-source domain adaptation (MSDA) method for food-typing recognition, which consists of three major components: stratified normalization, a multi-source domain adaptor, and adaptive ensemble learning. New techniques are developed for each component. Using a real-world dataset comprised of 15 participants, we demonstrate that our method achieves \(1.33\times\) to \(2.13\times\) improvement in accuracy compared with nine state-of-the-art MSDA baselines. Additionally, we perform an in-depth ablation study to examine the behavior of each component and confirm its efficacy. Jiexiong Guan, Wei Niu 0002, Shuangquan Wang, Zhenming Liu, Gang Zhou 0002, Bin Ren 0002 |
ACM Trans. Comput. Heal. | 3 |
| 2025 | Mobile-3DCNN: An Acceleration Framework for Ultra-Real-Time Execution of Large 3D CNNs on Mobile DevicesabstractIt is challenging to deploy 3D Convolutional Neural Networks (3D CNNs) on mobile devices, specifically if both real-time execution and high inference accuracy are in demand, because the increasingly large model size and complex model structure of 3D CNNs usually require tremendous computation and memory resources. Weight pruning is proposed to mitigate this challenge. However, existing pruning is either not compatible with modern parallel architectures, resulting in long inference latency or subject to significant accuracy degradation. This article proposes an end-to-end 3D CNN acceleration framework based on pruning/compilation co-design called Mobile-3DCNN that consists of two parts: a novel, fine-grained structured pruning enhanced by a prune/Winograd adaptive selection (that is mobile-hardware-friendly and can achieve high pruning accuracy), and a set of compiler optimization and code generation techniques enabled by our pruning (to fully transform the pruning benefit to real performance gains). The evaluation demonstrates that Mobile-3DCNN outperforms state-of-the-art end-to-end DNN acceleration frameworks that support 3D CNN execution on mobile devices, Alibaba Mobile Neural Networks and Pytorch-Mobile with speedup up to 34× with minor accuracy degradation, proving it is possible to execute high-accuracy large 3D CNNs on mobile devices in real-time (or even ultra-real-time). Wei Niu 0002, Mengshu Sun, Zhengang Li 0001, Jou-An Chen, Jiexiong Guan, Xipeng Shen, Jun Liu 0075, Yanzhi Wang 0001, Xue Lin 0001, Bin Ren 0002 |
ACM Trans. Archit. Code Optim. | 1 |
| 2025 | TSLA: A Task-Specific Learning Adaptation for Semantic Segmentation on Autonomous Vehicles PlatformabstractAutonomous driving platforms encounter diverse driving scenarios, each with varying hardware resources and precision requirements. Given the computational limitations of embedded devices, it is crucial to consider computing costs when deploying on target platforms like the DRIVE PX 2. Our objective is to customize the semantic segmentation network according to the computing power and specific scenarios of autonomous driving hardware. We implement dynamic adaptability through a three-tier control mechanism—width multiplier, classifier depth, and classifier kernel—allowing fine-grained control over model components based on hardware constraints and task requirements. This adaptability facilitates broad model scaling, targeted refinement of the final layers, and scenario-specific optimization of kernel sizes, leading to improved resource allocation and performance. Additionally, we leverage Bayesian Optimization with surrogate modeling to efficiently explore hyperparameter spaces under tight computational budgets. Our approach addresses scenario-specific and task-specific requirements through automatic parameter search, accommodating the unique computational complexity and accuracy needs of autonomous driving. It scales its multiply-accumulate operations (MACs) for task-specific learning adaptation (TSLA), resulting in alternative configurations tailored to diverse self-driving tasks. These TSLA customizations maximize computational capacity and model accuracy, optimizing hardware utilization. Jun Liu 0075, Zhenglun Kong, Pu Zhao 0001, Weihao Zeng 0002, Hao Tang 0005, Xuan Shen, Changdi Yang, Wenbin Zhang 0002, Geng Yuan, Wei Niu 0002, Xue Lin 0001, Yanzhi Wang 0001 |
IEEE Trans. Comput. Aided Des. Integr. Circuits Syst. | 10 |
| 2024 | SoD2: Statically Optimizing Dynamic Deep Neural Network ExecutionabstractThough many compilation and runtime systems have been developed for DNNs in recent years, the focus has largely been on static DNNs. Dynamic DNNs, where tensor shapes and sizes and even the set of operators used are dependent upon the input and/or execution, are becoming common. This paper presents SoD2, a comprehensive framework for optimizing Dynamic DNNs. The basis of our approach is a classification of common operators that form DNNs, and the use of this classification towards a Rank and Dimension Propagation (RDP) method. This framework statically determines the shapes of operators as known constants, symbolic constants, or operations on these. Next, using RDP we enable a series of optimizations, like fused code generation, execution (order) planning, and even runtime memory allocation plan generation. By evaluating the framework on 10 emerging Dynamic DNNs and comparing it against several existing systems, we demonstrate both reductions in execution latency and memory requirements, with RDP-enabled key optimizations responsible for much of the gains. Our evaluation results show that SoD2 runs up to 3.9× faster than these systems while saving up to 88% peak memory consumption. Wei Niu 0002, Gagan Agrawal, Bin Ren 0002 |
ASPLOS (1) | 1 |
| 2024 | SmartMem: Layout Transformation Elimination and Adaptation for Efficient DNN Execution on MobileabstractThis work is motivated by recent developments in Deep Neural Networks, particularly the Transformer architectures underlying applications such as ChatGPT, and the need for performing inference on mobile devices. Focusing on emerging transformers (specifically the ones with computationally efficient Swin-like architectures) and large models (e.g., Stable Diffusion and LLMs) based on transformers, we observe that layout transformations between the computational operators cause a significant slowdown in these applications. This paper presents SmartMem, a comprehensive framework for eliminating most layout transformations, with the idea that multiple operators can use the same tensor layout through careful choice of layout and implementation of operations. Our approach is based on classifying the operators into four groups, and considering combinations of producer-consumer edges between the operators. We develop a set of methods for searching such layouts. Another component of our work is developing efficient memory layouts for 2.5 dimensional memory commonly seen in mobile devices. Our experimental results show that SmartMem outperforms 5 state-of-the-art DNN execution frameworks on mobile devices across 18 varied neural networks, including CNNs, Transformers with both local and global attention, as well as LLMs. In particular, compared to DNNFusion, SmartMem achieves an average speedup of 2.8×, and outperforms TVM and MNN with speedups of 6.9× and 7.9×, respectively, on average. Wei Niu 0002, Md. Musfiqur Rahman Sanim, Zhihao Shu, Jiexiong Guan, Xipeng Shen, Miao Yin, Gagan Agrawal, Bin Ren 0002 |
ASPLOS (3) | 1 |
| 2024 | Data Overfitting for On-device Super-Resolution with Dynamic Algorithm and Compiler Co-design
Gen Li 0012, Zhihao Shu, Minghai Qin, Fatemeh Afghah, Wei Niu 0002 |
ECCV (67) | 6 |
| 2024 | NeurRev: Train Better Sparse Neural Network Practically via Neuron RevitalizationabstractDynamic Sparse Training (DST) employs a greedy search mechanism to identify an optimal sparse subnetwork by periodically pruning and growing network connections during training. To guarantee effectiveness, DST algorithms rely on high search frequency, which consequently, requires large learning rate and batch size to enforce stable neuron learning. Such settings demand extreme memory consumption, as well as generating significant system overheads that limit the wide deployment of deep learning-based applications on resource-constraint platforms. To reconcile such, we propose $\underline{Neur}$on $\underline{Rev}$italization framework for DST (NeurRev), based on an innovative finding that dormant neurons exist with the presence of weight sparsity, and cannot be revitalized (i.e., activated for learning) even with high sparse mask search frequency. These dormant neurons produce a large quantity of zeros during training, which contribute relatively little to the outputs of succeeding layers or to the final results. Different from most existing DST algorithms that spare no effort designing weight growing criteria, NeurRev focuses on optimizing the long-neglected pruning part, which awakes dormant neurons by pruning and incurs no additional computation costs. As such, NeurRev advances more effective neuron learning, which not only achieves outperforming accuracy in a variety of networks and datasets, but also promoting a low-cost dynamism at system-level. Systematical evaluations on training speed and system overhead are conducted on the mobile devices, where the proposed NeurRev framework consistently outperforms representative state-of-the-arts. Code will be released. Gen Li 0012, Lu Yin 0006, Wei Niu 0002, Minghai Qin, Bin Ren 0002, Linke Guo, Shiwei Liu 0003 |
ICLR | 4 |
| 2024 | Exploring Token Pruning in Vision State Space ModelsabstractState Space Models (SSMs) have the advantage of keeping linear computational complexity compared to attention modules in transformers, and have been applied to vision tasks as a new type of powerful vision foundation model. Inspired by the observations that the final prediction in vision transformers (ViTs) is only based on a subset of most informative tokens, we take the novel step of enhancing the efficiency of SSM-based vision models through token-based pruning. However, direct applications of existing token pruning techniques designed for ViTs fail to deliver good performance, even with extensive fine-tuning. To address this issue, we revisit the unique computational characteristics of SSMs and discover that naive application disrupts the sequential token positions. This insight motivates us to design a novel and general token pruning method specifically for SSM-based vision models. We first introduce a pruning-aware hidden state alignment method to stabilize the neighborhood of remaining tokens for performance enhancement. Besides, based on our detailed analysis, we propose a token importance evaluation method adapted for SSM models, to guide the token pruning. With efficient implementation and practical acceleration methods, our method brings actual speedup. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach can achieve significant computation reduction with minimal impact on performance across different tasks. Notably, we achieve 81.7\% accuracy on ImageNet with a 41.6\% reduction in the FLOPs for pruned PlainMamba-L3. Furthermore, our work provides deeper insights into understanding the behavior of SSM-based vision models for future research. Zheng Zhan 0001, Zhenglun Kong, Yifan Gong 0004, Yushu Wu, Zichong Meng, Hangyu Zheng, Xuan Shen, Stratis Ioannidis, Wei Niu 0002, Pu Zhao 0001, Yanzhi Wang 0001 |
NeurIPS | 9 |
| 2024 | Fast and Memory-Efficient Video Diffusion Using Streamlined InferenceabstractThe rapid progress in artificial intelligence-generated content (AIGC), especially with diffusion models, has significantly advanced development of high-quality video generation. However, current video diffusion models exhibit demanding computational requirements and high peak memory usage, especially for generating longer and higher-resolution videos. These limitations greatly hinder the practical application of video diffusion models on standard hardware platforms. To tackle this issue, we present a novel, training-free framework named Streamlined Inference, which leverages the temporal and spatial properties of video diffusion models. Our approach integrates three core components: Feature Slicer, Operator Grouping, and Step Rehash. Specifically, Feature Slicer effectively partitions input features into sub-features and Operator Grouping processes each sub-feature with a group of consecutive operators, resulting in significant memory reduction without sacrificing the quality or speed. Step Rehash further exploits the similarity between adjacent steps in diffusion, and accelerates inference through skipping unnecessary steps. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach significantly reduces peak memory and computational overhead, making it feasible to generate high-quality videos on a single consumer GPU (e.g., reducing peak memory of Animatediff from 42GB to 11GB, featuring faster inference on 2080Ti). Zheng Zhan 0001, Yushu Wu, Yifan Gong 0004, Zichong Meng, Zhenglun Kong, Changdi Yang, Geng Yuan, Pu Zhao 0001, Wei Niu 0002, Yanzhi Wang 0001 |
NeurIPS | 9 |
| 2024 | Real-time Core-Periphery Guided ViT with Smart Data Layout Selection on Mobile DevicesabstractMobile devices have become essential enablers for AI applications, particularly in scenarios that require real-time performance. Vision Transformer (ViT) has become a fundamental cornerstone in this regard due to its high accuracy. Recent efforts have been dedicated to developing various transformer architectures that offer im- proved accuracy while reducing the computational requirements. However, existing research primarily focuses on reducing the theoretical computational complexity through methods such as local attention and model pruning, rather than considering realistic performance on mobile hardware. Although these optimizations reduce computational demands, they either introduce additional overheads related to data transformation (e.g., Reshape and Transpose) or irregular computation/data-access patterns. These result in significant overhead on mobile devices due to their limited bandwidth, which even makes the latency worse than vanilla ViT on mobile. In this paper, we present ECP-ViT, a real-time framework that employs the core-periphery principle inspired by the brain functional networks to guide self-attention in ViTs and enable the deployment of ViT models on smartphones. We identify the main bottleneck in transformer structures caused by data transformation and propose a hardware-friendly core-periphery guided self-attention to decrease computation demands. Additionally, we design the system optimizations for intensive data transformation in pruned models. ECP-ViT, with the proposed algorithm-system co-optimizations, achieves a speedup of 4.6× to 26.9× on mobile GPUs across four datasets: STL-10, CIFAR100, TinyImageNet, and ImageNet. Zhihao Shu, Xiaowei Yu 0001, Zihao Wu 0001, Wenqi Jia 0003, Yinchen Shi, Miao Yin, Tianming Liu 0001, Dajiang Zhu, Wei Niu 0002 |
NeurIPS | 9 |
| 2023 | Towards Real-Time Segmentation on the EdgeabstractThe research in real-time segmentation mainly focuses on desktop GPUs. However, autonomous driving and many other applications rely on real-time segmentation on the edge, and current arts are far from the goal. In addition, recent advances in vision transformers also inspire us to re-design the network architecture for dense prediction task. In this work, we propose to combine the self attention block with lightweight convolutions to form new building blocks, and employ latency constraints to search an efficient sub-network. We train an MLP latency model based on generated architecture configurations and their latency measured on mobile devices, so that we can predict the latency of subnets during search phase. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to achieve over 74% mIoU on Cityscapes with semi-real-time inference (over 15 FPS) on mobile GPU from an off-the-shelf phone. Yanyu Li, Changdi Yang, Pu Zhao 0001, Geng Yuan, Wei Niu 0002, Jiexiong Guan, Hao Tang 0005, Minghai Qin, Qing Jin, Bin Ren 0002, Xue Lin 0001, Yanzhi Wang 0001 |
AAAI | 5 |
| 2023 | Towards High-Quality and Efficient Video Super-Resolution via Spatial-Temporal Data OverfittingabstractAs deep convolutional neural networks (DNNs) are widely used in various fields of computer vision, leveraging the overfitting ability of the DNN to achieve video resolution upscaling has become a new trend in the modern video delivery system. By dividing videos into chunks and over-fitting each chunk with a super-resolution model, the server encodes videos before transmitting them to the clients, thus achieving better video quality and transmission efficiency. However, a large number of chunks are expected to ensure good overfitting quality, which substantially increases the storage and consumes more bandwidth resources for data transmission. On the other hand, decreasing the number of chunks through training optimization techniques usually requires high model capacity, which significantly slows down execution speed. To reconcile such, we propose a novel method for high-quality and efficient video resolution upscaling tasks, which leverages the spatial-temporal information to accurately divide video into chunks, thus keeping the number of chunks as well as the model size to minimum. Additionally, we advance our method into a single overfitting model by a data-aware joint training technique. which further reduces the storage requirement with negligible quality drop. We deploy our models on an off-the-shelf mobile phone, and experimental results show that our method achieves real-time video super-resolution with high video quality. Compared with the state-of-the-art, our method achieves 28 fps streaming speed with 41.6 PSNR, which is 14 × faster and 2.29 dB better in the live video resolution upscaling tasks. Code available in https://github.com/coulsonlee/STDO-CVPR2023.git. Gen Li 0012, Minghai Qin, Wei Niu 0002, Bin Ren 0002, Fatemeh Afghah, Linke Guo |
CVPR | 4 |
| 2023 | Pruning Parameterization with Bi-level Optimization for Efficient Semantic Segmentation on the EdgeabstractWith the ever-increasing popularity of edge devices, it is necessary to implement real-time segmentation on the edge for autonomous driving and many other applications. Vision Transformers (ViTs) have shown considerably stronger results for many vision tasks. However, ViTs with the fullattention mechanism usually consume a large number of computational resources, leading to difficulties for real- time inference on edge devices. In this paper, we aim to derive ViTs with fewer computations and fast inference speed to facilitate the dense prediction of semantic segmentation on edge devices. To achieve this, we propose a pruning parameterization method to formulate the pruning problem of semantic segmentation. Then we adopt a bi-level optimization method to solve this problem with the help of implicit gradients. Our experimental results demonstrate that we can achieve 38.9 mIoU on ADE20K val with a speed of 56.5 FPS on Samsung S21, which is the highest mIoU under the same computation constraint with real-time inference. Changdi Yang, Pu Zhao 0001, Yanyu Li, Wei Niu 0002, Jiexiong Guan, Hao Tang 0005, Minghai Qin, Bin Ren 0002, Xue Lin 0001, Yanzhi Wang 0001 |
CVPR | 4 |
| 2023 | Decentralized Application-Level Adaptive Scheduling for Multi-Instance DNNs on Open Mobile Devices
Hsin-Hsuan Sung, Jou-An Chen, Wei Niu 0002, Jiexiong Guan, Bin Ren 0002, Xipeng Shen |
USENIX ATC | 3 |
| 2022 | SPViT: Enabling Faster Vision Transformers via Latency-Aware Soft Token Pruning
Zhenglun Kong, Peiyan Dong, Wei Niu 0002, Mengshu Sun, Xuan Shen, Geng Yuan, Bin Ren 0002, Hao Tang 0005, Minghai Qin, Yanzhi Wang 0001 |
ECCV (11) | 5 |
| 2022 | Compiler-Aware Neural Architecture Search for On-Mobile Real-time Super-Resolution
Yushu Wu, Yifan Gong 0004, Pu Zhao 0001, Yanyu Li, Zheng Zhan 0001, Wei Niu 0002, Hao Tang 0005, Minghai Qin, Bin Ren 0002, Yanzhi Wang 0001 |
ECCV (19) | 6 |
| 2022 | Real-Time Portrait Stylization on the EdgeabstractIn this work we demonstrate real-time portrait stylization, specifically, translating self-portrait into cartoon or anime style on mobile devices. We propose a latency-driven differentiable architecture search method, maintaining realistic generative quality. With our framework, we obtain 10× computation reduction on the generative model and achieve real-time video stylization on off-the-shelf smartphone using mobile GPUs. Yanyu Li, Xuan Shen, Geng Yuan, Jiexiong Guan, Wei Niu 0002, Hao Tang 0005, Bin Ren 0002, Yanzhi Wang 0001 |
IJCAI | 5 |
| 2022 | GCD2: A Globally Optimizing Compiler for Mapping DNNs to Mobile DSPsabstractMore specialized chips are exploiting available high transistor density to expose parallelism at a large scale with more intricate instruction sets. This paper reports on a compilation system GCD2, developed to support complex Deep Neural Network (DNN) workloads on mobile DSP chips. We observe several challenges in fully exploiting this architecture, related to SIMD width, more complex SIMD/vector instructions, and VLIW pipeline with the notion of soft dependencies. GCD2comprises the following contributions: 1) development of matrix layout formats that support the use of different novel SIMD instructions, 2) formulation and solution of a global optimization problem related to choosing the best instruction (and associated layout) for implementation of each operator in a complete DNN, and 3) SDA, an algorithm for packing instructions with consideration for soft dependencies. These solutions are incorporated in a complete compilation system that is extensively evaluated against other systems using 10 large DNN models. Evaluation results show that GCD2outperforms two product-level state-of-the-art end-to-end DNN execution frameworks (TFLite and Qualcomm SNPE) that support mobile DSPs by up to $ 6.0 \times$ speedup, and outperforms three established compilers (Halide, TVM, and RAKE) by up to $4.5 \times, 3.4 \times$ and $4.0 \times$ speedup, respectively. GCD2is also unique in supporting, real-time execution of certain DNNs, while its implementation enables two major DNNs to execute on a mobile DSP for the first time. Wei Niu 0002, Jiexiong Guan, Xipeng Shen, Yanzhi Wang 0001, Gagan Agrawal, Bin Ren 0002 |
MICRO | 1 |
| 2022 | SparCL: Sparse Continual Learning on the EdgeabstractExisting work in continual learning (CL) focuses on mitigating catastrophic forgetting, i.e., model performance deterioration on past tasks when learning a new task. However, the training efficiency of a CL system is under-investigated, which limits the real-world application of CL systems under resource-limited scenarios. In this work, we propose a novel framework called Sparse Continual Learning (SparCL), which is the first study that leverages sparsity to enable cost-effective continual learning on edge devices. SparCL achieves both training acceleration and accuracy preservation through the synergy of three aspects: weight sparsity, data efficiency, and gradient sparsity. Specifically, we propose task-aware dynamic masking (TDM) to learn a sparse network throughout the entire CL process, dynamic data removal (DDR) to remove less informative training data, and dynamic gradient masking (DGM) to sparsify the gradient updates. Each of them not only improves efficiency, but also further mitigates catastrophic forgetting. SparCL consistently improves the training efficiency of existing state-of-the-art (SOTA) CL methods by at most 23X less training FLOPs, and, surprisingly, further improves the SOTA accuracy by at most 1.7%. SparCL also outperforms competitive baselines obtained from adapting SOTA sparse training methods to the CL setting in both efficiency and accuracy. We also evaluate the effectiveness of SparCL on a real mobile phone, further indicating the practical potential of our method. Zifeng Wang 0002, Zheng Zhan 0001, Yifan Gong 0004, Geng Yuan, Wei Niu 0002, Tong Jian, Bin Ren 0002, Stratis Ioannidis, Yanzhi Wang 0001, Jennifer G. Dy |
NeurIPS | 5 |
| 2022 | Brief Industry Paper: Enabling Level-4 Autonomous Driving on a Single $1k Off-the-Shelf CardabstractIn the past few years we have developed hardware computing systems for commercial autonomous vehicles, but inevitably the high development cost and long turn-around time have been major roadblocks for commercial deployment. Hence we also explored the potential of software optimization. This paper, for the first-time, shows that it is feasible to enable full leve1-4 autonomous driving workloads on a single off-the-shelf card (Jetson AGX Xavier) for less than ${\$}1\mathrm{k}$, an order of magnitude less than the state-of-the-art systems, while meeting all the requirements of latency. The success comes from the resolution of some important issues shared by existing practices through a series of measures and innovations. Hsin-Hsuan Sung, Yuanchao Xu 0001, Jiexiong Guan, Wei Niu 0002, Bin Ren 0002, Yanzhi Wang 0001, Shaoshan Liu, Xipeng Shen |
RTAS | 4 |
| 2022 | GRIM: A General, Real-Time Deep Learning Inference Framework for Mobile Devices Based on Fine-Grained Structured Weight SparsityabstractIt is appealing but challenging to achieve real-time deep neural network (DNN) inference on mobile devices, because even the powerful modern mobile devices are considered as "resource-constrained" when executing large-scale DNNs. It necessitates the sparse model inference via weight pruning, i.e., DNN weight sparsity, and it is desirable to design a new DNN weight sparsity scheme that can facilitate real-time inference on mobile devices while preserving a high sparse model accuracy. This paper designs a novel mobile inference acceleration framework GRIM that is General to both convolutional neural networks (CNNs) and recurrent neural networks (RNNs) and that achieves Real-time execution and high accuracy, leveraging fine-grained structured sparse model Inference and compiler optimizations for Mobiles. We start by proposing a new fine-grained structured sparsity scheme through the Block-based Column-Row (BCR) pruning. Based on this new fine-grained structured sparsity, our GRIM framework consists of two parts: (a) the compiler optimization and code generation for real-time mobile inference; and (b) the BCR pruning optimizations for determining pruning hyperparameters and performing weight pruning. We compare GRIM with Alibaba MNN, TVM, TensorFlow-Lite, a sparse implementation based on CSR, PatDNN, and ESE (a representative FPGA inference acceleration framework for RNNs), and achieve up to 14.08× speedup. Wei Niu 0002, Zhengang Li 0001, Peiyan Dong, Gang Zhou 0002, Xuehai Qian, Xue Lin 0001, Yanzhi Wang 0001, Bin Ren 0002 |
IEEE Trans. Pattern Anal. Mach. Intell. | 1 |
| 2022 | Mobile or FPGA? A Comprehensive Evaluation on Energy Efficiency and a Unified Optimization FrameworkabstractEfficient deployment of Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) on edge devices (i.e., FPGAs and mobile platforms) is very challenging, especially under a recent witness of the increasing DNN model size and complexity. Model compression strategies, including weight quantization and pruning, are widely recognized as effective approaches to significantly reduce computation and memory intensities, and have been implemented in many DNNs on edge devices. However, most state-of-the-art works focus on ad hoc optimizations, and there lacks a thorough study to comprehensively reveal the potentials and constraints of different edge devices when considering different compression strategies. In this article, we qualitatively and quantitatively compare the energy efficiency of FPGA-based and mobile-based DNN executions using mobile GPU and provide a detailed analysis. Based on the observations obtained from the analysis, we propose a unified optimization framework using block-based pruning to reduce the weight storage and accelerate the inference speed on mobile devices and FPGAs, achieving high hardware performance and energy-efficiency gain while maintaining accuracy. Geng Yuan, Peiyan Dong, Mengshu Sun, Wei Niu 0002, Zhengang Li 0001, Yuxuan Cai 0001, Yanyu Li, Jun Liu 0075, Weiwen Jiang, Xue Lin 0001, Bin Ren 0002, Xulong Tang, Yanzhi Wang 0001 |
ACM Trans. Embed. Comput. Syst. | 4 |
| 2022 | Automatic Mapping of the Best-Suited DNN Pruning Schemes for Real-Time Mobile AccelerationabstractWeight pruning is an effective model compression technique to tackle the challenges of achieving real-time deep neural network (DNN) inference on mobile devices. However, prior pruning schemes have limited application scenarios due to accuracy degradation, difficulty in leveraging hardware acceleration, and/or restriction on certain types of DNN layers. In this article, we propose a general, fine-grained structured pruning scheme and corresponding compiler optimizations that are applicable to any type of DNN layer while achieving high accuracy and hardware inference performance. With the flexibility of applying different pruning schemes to different layers enabled by our compiler optimizations, we further probe into the new problem of determining the best-suited pruning scheme considering the different acceleration and accuracy performance of various pruning schemes. Two pruning scheme mapping methods—one -search based and the other is rule based—are proposed to automatically derive the best-suited pruning regularity and block size for each layer of any given DNN. Experimental results demonstrate that our pruning scheme mapping methods, together with the general fine-grained structured pruning scheme, outperform the state-of-the-art DNN optimization framework with up to 2.48 \( \times \) and 1.73 \( \times \) DNN inference acceleration on CIFAR-10 and ImageNet datasets without accuracy loss. Yifan Gong 0004, Geng Yuan, Zheng Zhan 0001, Wei Niu 0002, Zhengang Li 0001, Pu Zhao 0001, Yuxuan Cai 0001, Sijia Liu 0001, Bin Ren 0002, Xue Lin 0001, Xulong Tang, Yanzhi Wang 0001 |
ACM Trans. Design Autom. Electr. Syst. | 4 |
| 2021 | YOLObile: Real-Time Object Detection on Mobile Devices via Compression-Compilation Co-DesignabstractThe rapid development and wide utilization of object detection techniques have aroused attention on both accuracy and speed of object detectors. However, the current state-of-the-art object detection works are either accuracy-oriented using a large model but leading to high latency or speed-oriented using a lightweight model but sacrificing accuracy. In this work, we propose YOLObile framework, a real-time object detection on mobile devices via compression-compilation co-design. A novel block-punched pruning scheme is proposed for any kernel size. To improve computational efficiency on mobile devices, a GPU-CPU collaborative scheme is adopted along with advanced compiler-assisted optimizations. Experimental results indicate that our pruning scheme achieves 14x compression rate of YOLOv4 with 49.0 mAP. Under our YOLObile framework, we achieve 17 FPS inference speed using GPU on Samsung Galaxy S20. By incorporating our proposed GPU-CPU collaborative scheme, the inference speed is increased to 19.1 FPS, and outperforms the original YOLOv4 by 5x speedup. Source code is at: https://github.com/nightsnack/YOLObile. Yuxuan Cai 0001, Hongjia Li 0003, Geng Yuan, Wei Niu 0002, Yanyu Li, Xulong Tang, Bin Ren 0002, Yanzhi Wang 0001 |
AAAI | 4 |
| 2021 | A Compression-Compilation Co-Design Framework Towards Real-Time Object Detection on Mobile DevicesabstractThe rapid development and wide utilization of object detection techniques have aroused requirements for both accuracy and speed of object detectors. In this work, we propose a compression-compilation co-design framework to achieve real-time YOLOv4 inference on mobile devices. We propose a novel fine-grained structured pruning, which maintain high accuracy while achieving high hardware parallelism. Our pruned YOLOv4 achieves 48.9 mAP and 17 FPS inference speed on an off-the-shelf Samsung Galaxy S20 smartphone, which is 5.5x faster than the original state-of-the-art detector YOLOv4. Yuxuan Cai 0001, Geng Yuan, Hongjia Li 0003, Wei Niu 0002, Yanyu Li, Xulong Tang, Bin Ren 0002, Yanzhi Wang 0001 |
AAAI | 4 |
| 2021 | RT3D: Achieving Real-Time Execution of 3D Convolutional Neural Networks on Mobile DevicesabstractMobile devices are becoming an important carrier for deep learning tasks, as they are being equipped with powerful, high-end mobile CPUs and GPUs. However, it is still a challenging task to execute 3D Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) targeting for real-time performance, besides high inference accuracy. The reason is more complex model structure and higher model dimensionality overwhelm the available computation/storage resources on mobile devices. A natural way may be turning to deep learning weight pruning techniques. However, the direct generalization of existing 2D CNN weight pruning methods to 3D CNNs is not ideal for fully exploiting mobile parallelism while achieving high inference accuracy. This paper proposes RT3D, a model compression and mobile acceleration framework for 3D CNNs, seamlessly integrating neural network weight pruning and compiler code generation techniques. We propose and investigate two structured sparsity schemes i.e., the vanilla structured sparsity and kernel group structured (KGS) sparsity that are mobile acceleration friendly. The vanilla sparsity removes whole kernel groups, while KGS sparsity is a more fine-grained structured sparsity that enjoys higher flexibility while exploiting full on-device parallelism. We propose a reweighted regularization pruning algorithm to achieve the proposed sparsity schemes. The inference time speedup due to sparsity is approaching the pruning rate of the whole model FLOPs (floating point operations). RT3D demonstrates up to 29.1x speedup in end-to-end inference time comparing with current mobile frameworks supporting 3D CNNs, with moderate 1%~1.5% accuracy loss. The end-to-end inference time for 16 video frames could be within 150 ms, when executing representative C3D and R(2+1)D models on a cellphone. For the first time, real-time execution of 3D CNNs is achieved on off-the-shelf mobiles. Wei Niu 0002, Mengshu Sun, Zhengang Li 0001, Jou-An Chen, Jiexiong Guan, Xipeng Shen, Yanzhi Wang 0001, Sijia Liu 0001, Xue Lin 0001, Bin Ren 0002 |
AAAI | 1 |
| 2021 | Real-Time Mobile Acceleration of DNNs: From Computer Vision to Medical ApplicationsabstractWith the growth of mobile vision applications, there is a growing need to break through the current performance limitation of mobile platforms, especially for computationally intensive applications, such as object detection, action recognition, and medical diagnosis. To achieve this goal, we present our unified real-time mobile DNN inference acceleration framework, seamlessly integrating hardware-friendly, structured model compression with mobile-targeted compiler optimizations. We aim at an unprecedented, realtime performance of such large-scale neural network inference on mobile devices. A fine-grained block-based pruning scheme is proposed to be universally applicable to all types of DNN layers, such as convolutional layers with different kernel sizes and fully connected layers. Moreover, it is also successfully extended to 3D convolutions. With the assist of our compiler optimizations, the fine-grained block-based sparsity is fully utilized to achieve high model accuracy and high hardware acceleration simultaneously. To validate our framework, three representative fields of applications are implemented and demonstrated, object detection, activity detection, and medical diagnosis. All applications achieve real-time inference using an off-the-shelf smartphone, outperforming the representative mobile DNN inference acceleration frameworks by up to 6.7x in speed. The demonstrations of these applications can be found in the following link: https://bit.ly/39lWpYu. Hongjia Li 0003, Geng Yuan, Wei Niu 0002, Yuxuan Cai 0001, Mengshu Sun, Zhengang Li 0001, Bin Ren 0002, Xue Lin 0001, Yanzhi Wang 0001 |
ASP-DAC | 3 |
| 2021 | NPAS: A Compiler-Aware Framework of Unified Network Pruning and Architecture Search for Beyond Real-Time Mobile AccelerationabstractWith the increasing demand to efficiently deploy DNNs on mobile edge devices, it becomes much more important to reduce unnecessary computation and increase the execution speed. Prior methods towards this goal, including model compression and network architecture search (NAS), are largely performed independently, and do not fully consider compiler-level optimizations which is a must-do for mobile acceleration. In this work, we first propose (i) a general category of fine-grained structured pruning applicable to various DNN layers, and (ii) a comprehensive, compiler automatic code generation framework supporting different DNNs and different pruning schemes, which bridge the gap of model compression and NAS. We further propose NPAS, a compiler-aware unified network pruning and architecture search. To deal with large search space, we propose a meta-modeling procedure based on reinforcement learning with fast evaluation and Bayesian optimization, ensuring the total number of training epochs comparable with representative NAS frameworks. Our framework achieves 6.7ms, 5.9ms, and 3.9ms ImageNet inference times with 78.2%, 75% (MobileNet-V3 level), and 71% (MobileNet-V2 level) Top-1 accuracy respectively on an off-the-shelf mobile phone, consistently outperforming prior work. Zhengang Li 0001, Geng Yuan, Wei Niu 0002, Pu Zhao 0001, Yanyu Li, Yuxuan Cai 0001, Xuan Shen, Zheng Zhan 0001, Zhenglun Kong, Qing Jin, Zhiyu Chen 0003, Sijia Liu 0001, Kaiyuan Yang 0001, Bin Ren 0002, Yanzhi Wang 0001, Xue Lin 0001 |
CVPR | 3 |
| 2021 | Neural Pruning Search for Real-Time Object Detection of Autonomous VehiclesabstractObject detection plays an important role in self-driving cars for security development. However, mobile systems on self-driving cars with limited computation resources lead to difficulties for object detection. To facilitate this, we propose a compiler-aware neural pruning search framework to achieve high-speed inference on autonomous vehicles for 2D and 3D object detection. The framework automatically searches the pruning scheme and rate for each layer to find a best-suited pruning for optimizing detection accuracy and speed performance under compiler optimization. Our experiments demonstrate that for the first time, the proposed method achieves (close-to) real-time, 55ms and 97ms inference times for YOLOv4 based 2D object detection and PointPillars based 3D detection, respectively, on an off-the-shelf mobile phone with minor (or no) accuracy loss. Pu Zhao 0001, Geng Yuan, Yuxuan Cai 0001, Wei Niu 0002, Qi Liu 0017, Wujie Wen, Bin Ren 0002, Yanzhi Wang 0001, Xue Lin 0001 |
DAC | 4 |
| 2021 | HEALS: A Parallel eALS Recommendation System on CPU/GPU Heterogeneous PlatformsabstractAlternating Least Square (ALS) is a classic algorithm to solve matrix factorization widely used in recommendation systems. Existing efforts focus on parallelizing ALS on multi-/many-core platforms to handle large datasets. Recently, an optimized ALS variant called eALS was proposed, and it yields significantly lower time complexity and higher recommending accuracy than ALS. However, it is challenging to parallelize eALS on modern parallel architectures (e.g., CPUs and GPUs) because: 1) eALS’ data dependence prevents it from fine-grained parallel execution, thus eALS cannot fully utilize GPU's massive parallelism, 2) the sparsity of input data causes poor data locality and unbalanced workload, and 3) its large memory usage cannot fit into GPU's limited on-device memory, particularly for real-world large datasets. This paper proposes an efficient CPU/GPU heterogeneous rec-ommendation system based on fast eALS for the first time (called HEALS) that consists of a set of system optimizations. HEALS employs newly designed architecture-adaptive data formats to achieve load balance and good data locality on CPU and GPU. HEALS also presents a CPU/GPU collaboration model that can explore both task parallelism and data parallelism. HEALS also optimizes this collaboration model with data communication overlapping and dynamic workload partition between CPU and GPU. Moreover, HEALS is further enhanced by various parallel techniques (e.g., loop unrolling, vectorization, and GPU parallel reduction). Evaluation results show that HEALS outperforms other state-of-the-art baselines in both performance and recom-mendation quality. Particularly, HEALS achieves up to 5.75 x better performance than a state-of-the-art ALS GPU library. This work also demonstrates the possibility of conducting fast recommendations on large datasets with constrained (or relaxed) hardware resources, e.g, a single CPU/GPU node. Wei Niu 0002, Ruoming Jin, Bin Ren 0002 |
HiPC | 2 |
| 2021 | Achieving on-Mobile Real-Time Super-Resolution with Neural Architecture and Pruning SearchabstractThough recent years have witnessed remarkable progress in single image super-resolution (SISR) tasks with the prosperous development of deep neural networks (DNNs), the deep learning methods are confronted with the computation and memory consumption issues in practice, especially for resource-limited platforms such as mobile devices. To overcome the challenge and facilitate the real-time deployment of SISR tasks on mobile, we combine neural architecture search with pruning search and propose an automatic search framework that derives sparse super-resolution (SR) models with high image quality while satisfying the real-time inference requirement. To decrease the search cost, we leverage the weight sharing strategy by introducing a supernet and decouple the search problem into three stages, including supernet construction, compiler-aware architecture and pruning search, and compiler-aware pruning ratio search. With the proposed framework, we are the first to achieve real-time SR inference (with only tens of milliseconds per frame) for implementing 720p resolution with competitive image quality (in terms of PSNR and SSIM) on mobile platforms (Samsung Galaxy S20). Zheng Zhan 0001, Yifan Gong 0004, Pu Zhao 0001, Geng Yuan, Wei Niu 0002, Yushu Wu, Tianyun Zhang, Malith Jayaweera, David R. Kaeli, Bin Ren 0002, Xue Lin 0001, Yanzhi Wang 0001 |
ICCV | 5 |
| 2021 | ClickTrain: efficient and accurate end-to-end deep learning training via fine-grained architecture-preserving pruningabstractConvolutional neural networks (CNNs) are becoming increasingly deeper, wider, and non-linear because of the growing demand on prediction accuracy and analysis quality. The wide and deep CNNs, however, require a large amount of computing resources and processing time. Many previous works have studied model pruning to improve inference performance, but little work has been done for effectively reducing training cost. In this paper, we propose ClickTrain: an efficient and accurate end-to-end training and pruning framework for CNNs. Different from the existing pruning-during-training work, ClickTrain provides higher model accuracy and compression ratio via fine-grained architecture-preserving pruning. By leveraging pattern-based pruning with our proposed novel accurate weight importance estimation, dynamic pattern generation and selection, and compiler-assisted computation optimizations, ClickTrain generates highly accurate and fast pruned CNN models for direct deployment without any time overhead, compared with the baseline training. ClickTrain also reduces the end-to-end time cost of the state-of-the-art pruning-after-training method by up to 2.3x with comparable accuracy and compression ratio. Moreover, compared with the state-of-the-art pruning-during-training approach, ClickTrain provides significant improvements both accuracy and compression ratio on the tested CNN models and datasets, under similar limited training time. Chengming Zhang 0006, Geng Yuan, Wei Niu 0002, Jiannan Tian, Sian Jin, Donglin Zhuang, Zhe Jiang 0001, Yanzhi Wang 0001, Bin Ren 0002, Shuaiwen Song, Dingwen Tao |
ICS | 3 |
| 2021 | A Compression-Compilation Framework for On-mobile Real-time BERT ApplicationsabstractTransformer-based deep learning models have increasingly demonstrated high accuracy on many natural language processing (NLP) tasks. In this paper, we propose a compression-compilation co-design framework that can guarantee the identified model meets both resource and real-time specifications of mobile devices. Our framework applies a compiler-aware neural architecture optimization method (CANAO), which can generate the optimal compressed model that balances both accuracy and latency. We are able to achieve up to 7.8x speedup compared with TensorFlow-Lite with only minor accuracy loss. We present two types of BERT applications on mobile devices: Question Answering (QA) and Text Generation. Both can be executed in real-time with latency as low as 45ms. Videos for demonstrating the framework can be found on https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_WIRvK_2PZI Wei Niu 0002, Zhenglun Kong, Geng Yuan, Weiwen Jiang, Jiexiong Guan, Caiwen Ding, Pu Zhao 0001, Sijia Liu 0001, Bin Ren 0002, Yanzhi Wang 0001 |
IJCAI | 1 |
| 2021 | Towards Fast and Accurate Multi-Person Pose Estimation on Mobile DevicesabstractThe rapid development of autonomous driving, abnormal behavior detection, and behavior recognition makes an increasing demand for multi-person pose estimation-based applications, especially on mobile platforms. However, to achieve high accuracy, state-of-the-art methods tend to have a large model size and complex post-processing algorithm, which costs intense computation and long end-to-end latency. To solve this problem, we propose an architecture optimization and weight pruning framework to accelerate inference of multi-person pose estimation on mobile devices. With our optimization framework, we achieve up to 2.51X faster model inference speed with higher accuracy compared to representative lightweight multi-person pose estimator. Xuan Shen, Geng Yuan, Wei Niu 0002, Jiexiong Guan, Zhengang Li 0001, Bin Ren 0002, Yanzhi Wang 0001 |
IJCAI | 3 |
| 2021 | MEST: Accurate and Fast Memory-Economic Sparse Training Framework on the EdgeabstractRecently, 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. Geng Yuan, Wei Niu 0002, Zhengang Li 0001, Zhenglun Kong, Ning Liu 0007, Yifan Gong 0004, Zheng Zhan 0001, Chaoyang He 0001, Qing Jin, Siyue Wang, Minghai Qin, Bin Ren 0002, Yanzhi Wang 0001, Sijia Liu 0001, Xue Lin 0001 |
NeurIPS | 3 |
| 2021 | DNNFusion: accelerating deep neural networks execution with advanced operator fusionabstractDeep Neural Networks (DNNs) have emerged as the core enabler of many major applications on mobile devices. To achieve high accuracy, DNN models have become increasingly deep with hundreds or even thousands of operator layers, leading to high memory and computational requirements for inference. Operator fusion (or kernel/layer fusion) is key optimization in many state-of-the-art DNN execution frameworks, such as TensorFlow, TVM, and MNN, that aim to improve the efficiency of the DNN inference. However, these frameworks usually adopt fusion approaches based on certain patterns that are too restrictive to cover the diversity of operators and layer connections, especially those seen in many extremely deep models. Polyhedral-based loop fusion techniques, on the other hand, work on a low-level view of the computation without operator-level information, and can also miss potential fusion opportunities. To address this challenge, this paper proposes a novel and extensive loop fusion framework called DNNFusion. The basic idea of this work is to work at an operator view of DNNs, but expand fusion opportunities by developing a classification of both individual operators and their combinations. In addition, DNNFusion includes 1) a novel mathematical-property-based graph rewriting framework to reduce evaluation costs and facilitate subsequent operator fusion, 2) an integrated fusion plan generation that leverages the high-level analysis and accurate light-weight profiling, and 3) additional optimizations during fusion code generation. DNNFusion is extensively evaluated on 15 DNN models with varied types of tasks, model sizes, and layer counts. The evaluation results demonstrate that DNNFusion finds up to 8.8 × higher fusion opportunities, outperforms four state-of-the-art DNN execution frameworks with 9.3× speedup. The memory requirement reduction and speedups can enable the execution of many of the target models on mobile devices and even make them part of a real-time application. Wei Niu 0002, Jiexiong Guan, Yanzhi Wang 0001, Gagan Agrawal, Bin Ren 0002 |
PLDI | 1 |
| 2021 | Work in Progress: Mobile or FPGA? A Comprehensive Evaluation on Energy Efficiency and a Unified Optimization FrameworkabstractEfficient deployment of Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) on edge devices (i.e., FPGAs and mobile platforms) is very challenging, especially under a recent witness of the increasing DNN model size and complexity. Although various optimization approaches have been proven to be effective in many DNNs on edge devices, most state-of-the-art work focuses on ad-hoc optimizations, and there lacks a thorough study to comprehensively reveal the potentials and constraints of different edge devices when considering different optimizations. In this paper, we qualitatively and quantitatively compare the energyefficiency of FPGA-based and mobile-based DNN executions, and provide detailed analysis. Geng Yuan, Peiyan Dong, Mengshu Sun, Wei Niu 0002, Zhengang Li 0001, Yuxuan Cai 0001, Jun Liu 0075, Weiwen Jiang, Xue Lin 0001, Bin Ren 0002, Xulong Tang, Yanzhi Wang 0001 |
RTAS | 4 |
| 2021 | Brief Industry Paper: Towards Real-Time 3D Object Detection for Autonomous Vehicles with Pruning SearchabstractIn autonomous driving, 3D object detection is es-sential as it provides basic knowledge about the environment. However, as deep learning based 3D detection methods are usually computation intensive, it is challenging to support realtime 3D object detection on edge-computing devices in selfdriving cars with limited computation and memory resources. To facilitate this, we propose a compiler-aware pruning search framework, to achieve real-time inference of 3D object detection on the resource-limited mobile devices. Specifically, a generator is applied to sample better pruning proposals in the search space based on current proposals with their performance, and an evaluator is adopted to evaluate the sampled pruning proposal performance. To accelerate the search, the evaluator employs Bayesian optimization with an ensemble of neural predictors. We demonstrate in experiments that for the first time, the pruning search framework can achieve real-time 3D object detection on mobile (Samsung Galaxy S20 phone) with state-of-the-art detection performance. Pu Zhao 0001, Wei Niu 0002, Geng Yuan, Yuxuan Cai 0001, Hsin-Hsuan Sung, Shaoshan Liu, Sijia Liu 0001, Xipeng Shen, Bin Ren 0002, Yanzhi Wang 0001, Xue Lin 0001 |
RTAS | 2 |
| 2020 | PCONV: The Missing but Desirable Sparsity in DNN Weight Pruning for Real-Time Execution on Mobile DevicesabstractModel compression techniques on Deep Neural Network (DNN) have been widely acknowledged as an effective way to achieve acceleration on a variety of platforms, and DNN weight pruning is a straightforward and effective method. There are currently two mainstreams of pruning methods representing two extremes of pruning regularity: non-structured, fine-grained pruning can achieve high sparsity and accuracy, but is not hardware friendly; structured, coarse-grained pruning exploits hardware-efficient structures in pruning, but suffers from accuracy drop when the pruning rate is high. In this paper, we introduce PCONV, comprising a new sparsity dimension, – fine-grained pruning patterns inside the coarse-grained structures. PCONV comprises two types of sparsities, Sparse Convolution Patterns (SCP) which is generated from intra-convolution kernel pruning and connectivity sparsity generated from inter-convolution kernel pruning. Essentially, SCP enhances accuracy due to its special vision properties, and connectivity sparsity increases pruning rate while maintaining balanced workload on filter computation. To deploy PCONV, we develop a novel compiler-assisted DNN inference framework and execute PCONV models in real-time without accuracy compromise, which cannot be achieved in prior work. Our experimental results show that, PCONV outperforms three state-of-art end-to-end DNN frameworks, TensorFlow-Lite, TVM, and Alibaba Mobile Neural Network with speedup up to 39.2 ×, 11.4 ×, and 6.3 ×, respectively, with no accuracy loss. Mobile devices can achieve real-time inference on large-scale DNNs. Fu-Ming Guo, Wei Niu 0002, Xue Lin 0001, Jian Tang 0008, Kaisheng Ma, Bin Ren 0002, Yanzhi Wang 0001 |
AAAI | 3 |
| 2020 | PatDNN: Achieving Real-Time DNN Execution on Mobile Devices with Pattern-based Weight PruningabstractWith the emergence of a spectrum of high-end mobile devices, many applications that formerly required desktop-level computation capability are being transferred to these devices. However, executing Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) inference is still challenging considering the high computation and storage demands, specifically, if real-time performance with high accuracy is needed. Weight pruning of DNNs is proposed, but existing schemes represent two extremes in the design space: non-structured pruning is fine-grained, accurate, but not hardware friendly; structured pruning is coarse-grained, hardware-efficient, but with higher accuracy loss. Wei Niu 0002, Sheng Lin 0001, Xuehai Qian, Xue Lin 0001, Yanzhi Wang 0001, Bin Ren 0002 |
ASPLOS | 1 |
| 2020 | RTMobile: Beyond Real-Time Mobile Acceleration of RNNs for Speech RecognitionabstractRecurrent neural networks (RNNs) based automatic speech recognition has nowadays become promising and important on mobile devices such as smart phones. However, previous RNN compression techniques either suffer from hardware performance overhead due to irregularity or significant accuracy loss due to the preserved regularity for hardware friendliness. In this work, we propose RTMobile that leverages both a novel block-based pruning approach and compiler optimizations to accelerate RNN inference on mobile devices. Our proposed RTMobile is the first work that can achieve real-time RNN inference on mobile platforms. Experimental results demonstrate that RTMobile can significantly outperform existing RNN hardware acceleration methods in terms of both inference accuracy and time. Compared with prior work on FPGA, RTMobile using Adreno 640 embedded GPU on GRU can improve the energy-efficiency by 40× while maintaining the same inference time. Peiyan Dong, Siyue Wang, Wei Niu 0002, Chengming Zhang 0006, Sheng Lin 0001, Zhengang Li 0001, Yifan Gong 0004, Bin Ren 0002, Xue Lin 0001, Dingwen Tao |
DAC | 3 |
| 2020 | An Image Enhancing Pattern-Based Sparsity for Real-Time Inference on Mobile Devices
Wei Niu 0002, Tianyun Zhang, Sijia Liu 0001, Sheng Lin 0001, Hongjia Li 0003, Wujie Wen, Xiang Chen 0010, Jian Tang 0008, Kaisheng Ma, Bin Ren 0002, Yanzhi Wang 0001 |
ECCV (13) | 2 |
| 2020 | A Privacy-Preserving-Oriented DNN Pruning and Mobile Acceleration FrameworkabstractWeight pruning of deep neural networks (DNNs) has been proposed to satisfy the limited storage and computing capability of mobile edge devices. However, previous pruning methods mainly focus on reducing the model size and/or improving performance without considering the privacy of user data. To mitigate this concern, we propose a privacy-preserving-oriented pruning and mobile acceleration framework that does not require the private training dataset. At the algorithm level of the proposed framework, a systematic weight pruning technique based on the alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) is designed to iteratively solve the pattern-based pruning problem for each layer with randomly generated synthetic data. In addition, corresponding optimizations at the compiler level are leveraged for inference accelerations on devices. With the proposed framework, users could avoid the time-consuming pruning process for non-experts and directly benefit from compressed models. Experimental results show that the proposed framework outperforms three state-of-art end-to-end DNN frameworks, i.e., TensorFlow-Lite, TVM, and MNN, with speedup up to 4.2×, 2.5×, and 2.0×, respectively, with almost no accuracy loss, while preserving data privacy. Yifan Gong 0004, Zheng Zhan 0001, Zhengang Li 0001, Wei Niu 0002, Wenhao Wang 0001, Bin Ren 0002, Caiwen Ding, Xue Lin 0001, Xiaolin Xu 0001, Yanzhi Wang 0001 |
ACM Great Lakes Symposium on VLSI | 4 |
| 2020 | Towards Real-Time DNN Inference on Mobile Platforms with Model Pruning and Compiler OptimizationabstractHigh-end mobile platforms rapidly serve as primary computing devices for a wide range of Deep Neural Network (DNN) applications. However, the constrained computation and storage resources on these devices still pose significant challenges for real-time DNN inference executions. To address this problem, we propose a set of hardware-friendly structured model pruning and compiler optimization techniques to accelerate DNN executions on mobile devices. This demo shows that these optimizations can enable real-time mobile execution of multiple DNN applications, including style transfer, DNN coloring and super resolution. Wei Niu 0002, Pu Zhao 0001, Zheng Zhan 0001, Xue Lin 0001, Yanzhi Wang 0001, Bin Ren 0002 |
IJCAI | 1 |
| 2017 | User-aware partitioning algorithm for mobile cloud computing based on maximum graph cuts
Jianwei Niu 0002, Wei Niu 0002, Mohammed Atiquzzaman |
Comput. Networks | 3 |