Title: Replacing Multi-Layer Perceptron with Taylor Expansion
Primary area: optimization
Keywords: MLP, efficient inference

Abstract: The Multi-Layer Perceptron (MLP) constitutes a fundamental building block of deep learning. However, its inherent reliance on dense matrix multiplication imposes a substantial computational burden, especially on resource-constrained edge devices, which poses a critical challenge to the real-time inference requirements of edge artificial intelligence applications. In this paper, we propose T-MLP, a novel method that mitigates this challenge by approximating the MLP via a light-weight module that combines K-means and first-order Taylor expansion. Replaced by T-MLP, MLP online inference is reduced to a single K-means assignment, followed by one dense matrix multiplication and two element-wise additions. On a commercial edge device, T-MLP yields$>100\\times$  speed-up on large-scale MLP with $<1\\%$ accuracy loss. Grounded in reduced time-complexity and hardware-friendly footprint, T-MLP establishes a new paradigm for edge-side efficient inference.

TL;DR: We replace the MLP with a lightweight module that combines K-means clustering and Taylor expansion, enabling highly efficient inference.