English

msf-CNN: Patch-based Multi-Stage Fusion with Convolutional Neural Networks for TinyML

Machine Learning 2025-10-20 v3 Performance

Abstract

AI spans from large language models to tiny models running on microcontrollers (MCUs). Extremely memory-efficient model architectures are decisive to fit within an MCU's tiny memory budget e.g., 128kB of RAM. However, inference latency must remain small to fit real-time constraints. An approach to tackle this is patch-based fusion, which aims to optimize data flows across neural network layers. In this paper, we introduce msf-CNN, a novel technique that efficiently finds optimal fusion settings for convolutional neural networks (CNNs) by walking through the fusion solution space represented as a directed acyclic graph. Compared to previous work on CNN fusion for MCUs, msf-CNN identifies a wider set of solutions. We published an implementation of msf-CNN running on various microcontrollers (ARM Cortex-M, RISC-V, ESP32). We show that msf-CNN can achieve inference using 50% less RAM compared to the prior art (MCUNetV2 and StreamNet). We thus demonstrate how msf-CNN offers additional flexibility for system designers.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2505.11483,
  title  = {msf-CNN: Patch-based Multi-Stage Fusion with Convolutional Neural Networks for TinyML},
  author = {Zhaolan Huang and Emmanuel Baccelli},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2505.11483},
  year   = {2025}
}

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NeurIPS 2025 (poster)

R2 v1 2026-06-28T23:36:29.528Z