Acceleration-aware, Retraining-free Evolutionary Pruning for Automated Fitment of Deep Learning Models on Edge Devices

Deep Learning architectures used in computer vision, natural language and speech processing, unsupervised clustering, etc. have become highly complex and application-specific in recent times. Despite existing automated feature engineering techniques, building such complex models still requires extensive domain knowledge or a huge infrastructure for employing techniques such as Neural Architecture Search (NAS). Further, many industrial applications need in-premises decision-making close to sensors, thus making deployment of deep learning models on edge devices a desirable and often necessary option. Instead of freshly designing application-specific Deep Learning models, the transformation of already built models can achieve faster time to market and cost reduction. In this work, we present an efficient re-training-free model compression method that searches for the best hyper-parameters to reduce the model size and latency without losing any accuracy. Moreover, our proposed method takes into account any drop in accuracy due to hardware acceleration, when a Deep Neural Network is executed on accelerator hardware.