Resource-Efficient Convolutional Networks: A Survey on Model-, Arithmetic-, and Implementation-Level Techniques

Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) are used in our daily life, including self-driving cars, virtual assistants, social network services, healthcare services, and face recognition, among others. However, deep CNNs demand substantial compute resources during training and inference. The machine learning community has mainly focused on model-level optimizations such as architectural compression of CNNs, whereas the system community has focused on implementation-level optimization. In between, various arithmetic-level optimization techniques have been proposed in the arithmetic community. This article provides a survey on resource-efficient CNN techniques in terms of model-, arithmetic-, and implementation-level techniques, and identifies the research gaps for resource-efficient CNN techniques across the three different level techniques. Our survey clarifies the influence from higher- to lower-level techniques based on our resource efficiency metric definition and discusses the future trend for resource-efficient CNN research.