Balancing Accuracy and Latency in Multipath Neural Networks

The growing capacity of neural networks has strongly contributed to their success at complex machine learning tasks and the computational demand of such large models has, in turn, stimulated a significant improvement in the hardware necessary to accelerate their computations. However, models with high latency aren't suitable for limited-resource environments such as hand-held and IoT devices. Hence, many deep learning techniques aim to address this problem by developing models with reasonable accuracy without violating the limited-resource constraint. In this work, we use a one-shot neural architecture search model to implicitly evaluate the performance of an intractable number of multipath neural networks. Combining this architecture search with a pruning technique and architecture sample evaluation, we can model the relation between the accuracy and the latency of a spectrum of models with graded complexity. We show that our method can accurately model the relative performance between models with different latencies and predict the performance of unseen models with good precision across different datasets.