Convolution is a critical component in modern deep neural networks, thus several algorithms for convolution have been developed. Direct convolution is simple but suffers from poor performance. As an alternative, multiple indirect methods have been proposed including im2col-based convolution, FFT-based convolution, or Winograd-based algorithm. However, all these indirect methods have high memory-overhead, which creates performance degradation and offers a poor trade-off between performance and memory consumption. In this work, we propose a memory-efficient convolution or MEC with compact lowering, which reduces memory-overhead substantially and accelerates convolution process. MEC lowers the input matrix in a simple yet efficient/compact way (i.e., much less memory-overhead), and then executes multiple small matrix multiplications in parallel to get convolution completed. Additionally, the reduced memory footprint improves memory sub-system efficiency, improving performance. Our experimental results show that MEC reduces memory consumption significantly with good speedup on both mobile and server platforms, compared with other indirect convolution algorithms.

本文提出一种具有内存效率的卷积方法，即MEC，使用简单且高效/紧凑的方式降低输入矩阵的内存开销，提高卷积运算速度，显著减少内存消耗，在移动设备和服务器平台上都具有良好的加速效果，适用于卷积运算的深度神经网络模型。

MEC: 深度神经网络的内存高效卷积