Google Open Sources TensorFlow Version of MorphNet DL Tool

By John Russell

April 18, 2019

Designing optimum deep neural networks remains a non-trivial exercise. “Given the large search space of possible architectures, designing a network from scratch for your specific application can be prohibitively expensive in terms of computational resources and time,” write Andrew Poon and Dhyanesh Narayanan on Google’s Research blog. “Approaches such as Neural Architecture Search and AdaNet use machine learning to search the design space in order to find improved architectures. An alternative is to take an existing architecture for a similar problem and, in one shot, optimize it for the task at hand.”

In the blog, they announce Google has open sourced a TensorFlow implementation of its MorphNet tool which permits taking an existing DNN developed for one problem and rapidly adopting it for another. “MorphNet takes an existing neural network as input and produces a new neural network that is smaller, faster, and yields better performance tailored to a new problem. We’ve applied the technique to Google-scale problems to design production-serving networks that are both smaller and more accurate, and now we have open sourced the TensorFlow implementation of MorphNet to the community so that you can use it to make your models more efficient,” they write.

For DNN developers and users, the new tool could save time and simplify networks.

“MorphNet optimizes a neural network through a cycle of shrinking and expanding phases,” write Poon and Narayanan. “In the shrinking phase, MorphNet identifies inefficient neurons and prunes them from the network by applying a sparsifying regularizer such that the total loss function of the network includes a cost for each neuron. However, rather than applying a uniform cost per neuron, MorphNet calculates a neuron cost with respect to the targeted resource. As training progresses, the optimizer is aware of the resource cost when calculating gradients, and thus learns which neurons are resource-efficient and which can be removed.”

Poon and Narayanan present several examples and bullet out the following “four key value propositions offered by MorphNet:”

  • Targeted Regularization. The approach that MorphNet takes towards regularization is more intentional than other sparsifying regularizers. In particular, the MorphNet approach to induce better sparsification is targeted at the reduction of a particular resource (such as FLOPs per inference or model size). This enables better control of the network structures induced by MorphNet, which can be markedly different depending on the application domain and associated constraints.For example, the left panel of the figure below presents a baseline network with the commonly used ResNet-101 architecture trained on JFT. The structures generated by MorphNet when targeting FLOPs (center, with 40% fewer FLOPs) or model size (right, with 43% fewer weights) are dramatically different. When optimizing for computation cost, higher-resolution neurons in the lower layers of the network tend to be pruned more than lower-resolution neurons in the upper layers. When targeting smaller model size, the pruning tradeoff is the opposite.
Targeted Regularization by MorphNet. Rectangle width is proportional to the number of channels in the layer. The purple bar at the bottom is the input layer. Left: Baseline network used as input to MorphNet. Center: Output applying FLOP regularizer. Right: Output applying size regularizer.
  • Topology Morphing. As MorphNet learns the number of neurons per layer, the algorithm could encounter a special case of sparsifying all the neurons in a layer. When a layer has 0 neurons, this effectively changes the topology of the network by cutting the affected branch from the network.
  • Scalability. MorphNet learns the new structure in a single training run and is a great approach when your training budget is limited. MorphNet can also be applied directly to expensive networks and datasets.
  • Portability. MorphNet produces networks that are “portable” in the sense that they are intended to be retrained from scratch and the weights are not tied to the architecture learning procedure. You don’t have to worry about copying checkpoints or following special training recipes. Simply train your new network as you normally would.
MorphNet applied to Inception V2 on ImageNet. Applying the flop regularizer alone (blue) improves the performance relative to baseline (red) by 11-15%. A full cycle, including both the regularizer and width multiplier, yields an increase in accuracy for the same cost (“x1”; purple), with continued improvement from a second cycle (“x2”; cyan).

“As a demonstration, we applied MorphNet to Inception V2 trained on ImageNet by targeting FLOPs. The baseline approach is to use a width multiplier to trade off accuracy and FLOPs by uniformly scaling down the number of outputs for each convolution (red). The MorphNet approach targets FLOPs directly and produces a better trade-off curve when shrinking the model (blue). In this case, FLOP cost is reduced 11% to 15% with the same accuracy as compared to the baseline,” write the researchers.

They conclude with, “We’ve applied MorphNet to several production-scale image processing models at Google. Using MorphNet resulted in significant reduction in model-size/FLOPs with little to no loss in quality. We invite you to try MorphNet—the open source TensorFlow implementation can be found here, and you can also read the MorphNet paper for more details.”

Link to Google blog (MorphNet: Towards Faster and Smaller Neural Networks): https://ai.googleblog.com

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