lighter

Definition

Smaller along some cost axis — parameter count, memory footprint, or FLOPs — usually asserted alongside a claim that quality is largely preserved. The word appears in distillation, quantization, and pruning results. It is worth pinning down which axis is meant: a model with fewer bits per weight may not run faster if the kernels are unoptimized, and fewer parameters does not automatically mean lower latency.

In the textbook

• The Race to Go Lighter — the MobileNet Line