SWANN: Small-World Architecture for Fast Convergence of Neural Networks

On-device intelligence has become increasingly widespread in the modern smart application landscape. A standing challenge for the applicability of on- device intelligence is the excessively high computation cost of training highly accurate Deep Learning (DL) models. These models require a large number of training iterations to reach a high convergence accuracy, hindering their applicability to resource-constrained embedded devices. This paper proposes a novel transformation which changes the topology of the DL architecture to reach an optimal cross-layer connectivity. This, in turn, significantly reduces the number of training iterations required for reaching a target accuracy. Our transformation leverages the important observation that for a set level of accuracy, convergence is fastest when network topology reaches the boundary of a Small-World Network. Small-world graphs are known to possess a specific connectivity structure that enables enhanced signal propagation among nodes. Our small-world models, called SWANNs, provide several intriguing benefits: they facilitate data (gradient) flow within the network, enable feature-map reuse by adding long-range connections and accommodate various network architectures/datasets. Compared to densely connected networks (e.g., DenseNets), SWANNs require a substantially fewer number of training parameters while maintaining a similar level of classification accuracy. We evaluate our networks on various DL model architectures and image classification datasets, namely, MNIST, CIFAR10, CIFAR100, and ImageNet. Our experiments demonstrate an average of
$\approx 2.1\times $
improvement in convergence speed to the desired accuracy.