Explore Training of Deep Convolutional Neural Networks on Battery-powered Mobile Devices: Design and Application

Cong Wang, Yanru Xiao, Xing Gao, Li Li, Jun Wang

Published 2020-05-26Version 1

The fast-growing smart applications on mobile devices leverage pre-trained deep learning models for inference. However, the models are usually not updated thereafter. This leaves a big gap to adapt the new data distributions. In this paper, we take a step further to incorporate training deep neural networks on battery-powered mobile devices. We identify several challenges from performance and privacy that hinder effective learning in a dynamic mobile environment. We re-formulate the problem as metric learning to tackle overfitting and enlarge sample space via data paring under the memory constraints. We also make the scheme robust against side-channel attacks and run-time fluctuations. A case study based on deep behavioral authentication is conducted. The experiments demonstrate accuracy over 95% on three public datasets, a sheer 15% gain from multi-class classification with less data and robustness against brute-force and side-channel attacks with 99% and 90% success, respectively. We show the feasibility of training with mobile CPUs, where training 100 epochs takes less than 10 mins and can be boosted 3-5 times with feature transfer. Finally, we profile memory, energy and computational overhead. Our results indicate that training consumes lower energy than watching videos and slightly higher energy than playing games.