MCUNet: Tiny Deep Learning on IoT Devices

This is the official implementation of the MCUNet series.

TinyML Project Website | MCUNetV1 | MCUNetV2 | MCUNetV3

demo

News

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(2024/03) We release a new demo video of On-Device Training Under 256KB Memory.
(2023/10) Tiny Machine Learning: Progress and Futures [Feature] appears at IEEE CAS Magazine.
(2022/12) We simplified the net_id of models (new version: mcunet-in0, mcunet-vww1, etc.) for an upcoming review paper (stay tuned!).
(2022/10) Our new work On-Device Training Under 256KB Memory is highlighted on the MIT homepage!
(2022/09) Our new work On-Device Training Under 256KB Memory is accepted to NeurIPS 2022! It enables tiny on-device training for IoT devices.
(2022/08) We release the source code of TinyEngine in this repo. Please take a look!
(2022/08) Our new course on TinyML and Efficient Deep Learning will be released soon in September 2022: efficientml.ai.
(2022/07) We also include the person detection model used in the video demo above. We will also include the deployment code in TinyEngine release.
(2022/06) We refactor the MCUNet repo as a standalone repo (previous repo: https://github.com/mit-han-lab/tinyml)
(2021/10) MCUNetV2 is accepted to NeurIPS 2021: https://arxiv.org/abs/2110.15352 !
(2020/10) MCUNet is accepted to NeurIPS 2020 as spotlight: https://arxiv.org/abs/2007.10319 !
Our projects are covered by: MIT News, MIT News (v2), WIRED, Morning Brew, Stacey on IoT, Analytics Insight, Techable, etc.

Overview

Microcontrollers are low-cost, low-power hardware. They are widely deployed and have wide applications.

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But the tight memory budget (50,000x smaller than GPUs) makes deep learning deployment difficult.

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MCUNet is a system-algorithm co-design framework for tiny deep learning on microcontrollers. It consists of TinyNAS and TinyEngine. They are co-designed to fit the tight memory budgets.

With system-algorithm co-design, we can significantly improve the deep learning performance on the same tiny memory budget.

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Our TinyEngine inference engine could be a useful infrastructure for MCU-based AI applications. It significantly improves the inference speed and reduces the memory usage compared to existing libraries like TF-Lite Micro, CMSIS-NN, MicroTVM, etc. It improves the inference speed by 1.5-3x, and reduces the peak memory by 2.7-4.8x.

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Model Zoo

Usage

You can build the pre-trained PyTorch fp32 model or the int8 quantized model in TF-Lite format.

from mcunet.model_zoo import net_id_list, build_model, download_tflite
print(net_id_list)  # the list of models in the model zoo

# pytorch fp32 model
model, image_size, description = build_model(net_id="mcunet-in3", pretrained=True)  # you can replace net_id with any other option from net_id_list

# download tflite file to tflite_path
tflite_path = download_tflite(net_id="mcunet-in3")

Evaluate

To evaluate the accuracy of PyTorch fp32 models, run:

python eval_torch.py --net_id mcunet-in2 --dataset {imagenet/vww} --data-dir PATH/TO/DATA/val

To evaluate the accuracy of TF-Lite int8 models, run:

python eval_tflite.py --net_id mcunet-in2 --dataset {imagenet/vww} --data-dir PATH/TO/DATA/val

Model List

Note that all the latency, SRAM, and Flash usage are profiled with TinyEngine on STM32F746.
Here we only provide the int8 quantized modes. int4 quantized models (as shown in the paper) can further push the accuracy-memory trade-off, but lacking a general format support.
For accuracy (top1, top-5), we report the accuracy of fp32/int8 models respectively

The ImageNet model list:

net_id	MACs	#Params	SRAM	Flash	Res.	Top-1 (fp32/int8)	Top-5 (fp32/int8)
# baseline models
mbv2-w0.35	23.5M	0.75M	308kB	862kB	144	49.7%/49.0%	74.6%/73.8%
proxyless-w0.3	38.3M	0.75M	292kB	892kB	176	57.0%/56.2%	80.2%/79.7%
# mcunet models
mcunet-in0	6.4M	0.75M	266kB	889kB	48	41.5%/40.4%	66.3%/65.2%
mcunet-in1	12.8M	0.64M	307kB	992kB	96	51.5%/49.9%	75.5%/74.1%
mcunet-in2	67.3M	0.73M	242kB	878kB	160	60.9%/60.3%	83.3%/82.6%
mcunet-in3	81.8M	0.74M	293kB	897kB	176	62.2%/61.8%	84.5%/84.2%
mcunet-in4	125.9M	1.73M	456kB	1876kB	160	68.4%/68.0%	88.4%/88.1%

The VWW model list:

Note that the VWW dataset might be hard to prepare. You can download our pre-built minival set from here, around 380MB.

net_id	MACs	#Params	SRAM	Flash	Resolution	Top-1 (fp32/int8)
mcunet-vww0	6.0M	0.37M	146kB	617kB	64	87.4%/87.3%
mcunet-vww1	11.6M	0.43M	162kB	689kB	80	88.9%/88.9%
mcunet-vww2	55.8M	0.64M	311kB	897kB	144	91.7%/91.8%

For TF-Lite int8 models, we do not use quantization-aware training (QAT), so some results is slightly lower than paper numbers.

Detection Model

We also share the person detection model used in the demo. To visualize the model's prediction on a sample image, please run the following command:

python eval_det.py

It will visualize the prediction here: assets/sample_images/person_det_vis.jpg.

The model takes in a small input resolution of 128x160 to reduce memory usage. It does not achieve state-of-the-art performance due to the limited image and model size but should provide decent performance for tinyML applications (please check the demo for a video recording). We will also release the deployment code in the upcoming TinyEngine release.

Requirement

Python 3.6+
PyTorch 1.4.0+
Tensorflow 1.15 (if you want to test TF-Lite models; CPU support only)

Acknowledgement

We thank MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab, Intel, Amazon, SONY, Qualcomm, NSF for supporting this research.

Citation

If you find the project helpful, please consider citing our paper:

@article{lin2020mcunet,
  title={Mcunet: Tiny deep learning on iot devices},
  author={Lin, Ji and Chen, Wei-Ming and Lin, Yujun and Gan, Chuang and Han, Song},
  journal={Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems},
  volume={33},
  year={2020}
}

@inproceedings{
  lin2021mcunetv2,
  title={MCUNetV2: Memory-Efficient Patch-based Inference for Tiny Deep Learning},
  author={Lin, Ji and Chen, Wei-Ming and Cai, Han and Gan, Chuang and Han, Song},
  booktitle={Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS)},
  year={2021}
} 

@article{
  lin2022ondevice, 
  title = {On-Device Training Under 256KB Memory},
  author = {Lin, Ji and Zhu, Ligeng and Chen, Wei-Ming and Wang, Wei-Chen and Gan, Chuang and Han, Song}, 
  journal = {arXiv:2206.15472 [cs]},
  url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2206.15472},
  year = {2022}
}