CODE: Compiler-based Neuron-aware Ensemble training

Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) are redefining the state-of-the-art performance in a variety of tasks like speech recognition and image classification. These impressive results are often enabled by ensembling many DNNs together. Surprisingly, ensembling is often done by training several DNN instances from scratch and combining them. This paper shows that there is significant redundancy in today's way of ensembling. The novelty we propose is CODE, a compiler approach designed to automatically generate DNN ensembles while avoiding unnecessary retraining among its DNNs. For this purpose, CODE introduces neuron-level analyses and transformations aimed at identifying and removing redundant computation from the networks that compose the ensemble. Removing redundancy enables CODE to train large DNN ensembles in a fraction of the time and memory footprint needed by current techniques. These savings can be leveraged by CODE to increase the output quality of its ensembles.