tinyML Talks: A hardware-aware neural architecture search algorithm targeting ultra-low-power microcontrollers

Hardware-aware neural architecture search (HW NAS), the process of automating the design of neural architectures taking into consideration hardware constraints, has already outperformed the best human designs on many tasks. However, it is known to be highly demanding in terms of hardware, thus limiting access to non-habitual neural network users. Fostering its adoption for the next-generation IoT and wearable devices design, we propose an HW NAS that can be run on laptops, even if not mounting a GPU. The proposed technique, designed to have both a low search cost and resource usage, produces tiny convolutional neural networks (CNNs) targeting low-end microcontrollers. It achieves state-of-the-art results in the human-recognition tasks, on the Visual Wake Word dataset a standard TinyML benchmark, in just 3:37:0 hours on a laptop mounting an 11th Gen Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-11370H CPU @ 3. 30GHz equipped with 16 GB of RAM and 512 GB of SSD, without using a GPU.

Date

August 29, 2023

Location

Virtual

Contact us

Discussion

Schedule

Timezone: PDT

A hardware-aware neural architecture search algorithm targeting ultra-low-power microcontrollers

Andrea Mattia GARAVAGNO, PhD student

Sant'Anna School of Advanced Studies of Pisa

Andrea Mattia GARAVAGNO, PhD student

Sant'Anna School of Advanced Studies of Pisa

Andrea Mattia Garavagno was born in Rome (Italy) in 1996. He received his BSc in Electronic Engineering from the University of Genoa, and the MSc in Embedded Computing Systems from Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna and the University of Pisa, Italy. He is currently a PhD student at the Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna and the University of Genoa. Together with Giuliano Donzellini e Luca Oneto, he co-authored the Italian book “Introduzione al Progetto di Sistemi a Microprocessore”, and the international book “Introduction to Microprocessor-Based Systems Design” published by Springer in 2021 and 2022. Currently he’s working on hardware-aware neural architecture search targeting microcontrollers.

Schedule subject to change without notice.