EH-DNAS: End-to-End Hardware-aware Differentiable Neural Architecture Search

In hardware-aware Differentiable Neural Architecture Search (DNAS), it is challenging to integrate hardware metrics into network architecture search. To handle hardware metrics, such as inference latency, existing works mainly rely on linear approximations and lack of support for various customized hardware. In this work, we propose End-to-end Hardware-aware DNAS (EH-DNAS), a seamless integration of an end-to-end hardware performance differentiable approximation, and a fully automated DNAS to deliver hardware-efficient deep neural networks on various hardware, including Edge GPUs, Edge TPUs, Mobile CPUs, and customized accelerators. Given a targeted hardware platform, we propose to learn a differentiable model predicting the end-to-end hardware performance of the neural network architectures during DNAS. We also propose E2E-Perf, a benchmarking tool to expand our design to support customized accelerators. Experiments on CIFAR10 and ImageNet show that EH-DNAS improves the hardware performance by an average of 1.5 times on customized accelerators and existing hardware processors than the state-of-the-art efficient networks while maintaining highly competitive model inference accuracy.