LUT-NN: Towards Unified Neural Network Inference by Table Lookup

DNN inference requires huge effort of system development and resource cost. This drives us to propose LUT-NN, the first trial towards empowering deep neural network (DNN) inference by table lookup, to eliminate the diverse computation kernels as well as save running cost. Based on the feature similarity of each layer, LUT-NN can learn the typical features, named centroids, of each layer from the training data, precompute them with model weights, and save the results in tables. For future input, the results of the closest centroids with the input features can be directly read from the table, as the approximation of layer output. We propose the novel centroid learning technique for DNN, which enables centroid learning through backpropagation, and adapts three levels of approximation to minimize the model loss. By this technique, LUT-NN achieves comparable accuracy (<5% difference) with original models on real complex dataset, including CIFAR, ImageNet, and GLUE. LUT-NN simplifies the computing operators to only two: closest centroid search and table lookup. We implement them for Intel and ARM CPUs. The model size is reduced by up to 3.5x for CNN models and 7x for BERT. Latency-wise, the real speedup of LUT-NN is up to 7x for BERT and 2x for ResNet, much lower than theoretical results because of the current unfriendly hardware design for table lookup. We expect firstclass table lookup support in the future to unleash the potential of LUT-NN.