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1. Processing-in-Memory Accelerator for Dynamic Neural Network with Run-Time Tuning of Accuracy, Power and Latency

   https://doi.org/10.1109/SOCC49529.2020.9524770  

   Yang, Li; He, Zhezhi; Angizi, Shaahin; Fan, Deliang (September 2020, 2020 IEEE 33rd International System-on-Chip Conference (SOCC))

   null (Ed.)

   With the widely deployment of powerful deep neural network (DNN) into smart, but resource limited IoT devices, many prior works have been proposed to compress DNN in a hardware-aware manner to reduce the computing complexity, while maintaining accuracy, such as weight quantization, pruning, convolution decomposition, etc. However, in typical DNN compression methods, a smaller, but fixed, network structure is generated from a relative large background model for resource limited hardware accelerator deployment. However, such optimization lacks the ability to tune its structure on-the-fly to best fit for a dynamic computing hardware resource allocation and workloads. In this paper, we mainly review two of our prior works [1], [2] to address this issue, discussing how to construct a dynamic DNN structure through either uniform or non-uniform channel selection based sub-network sampling. The constructed dynamic DNN could tune its computing path to involve different number of channels, thus providing the ability to trade-off between speed, power and accuracy on-the-fly after model deployment. Correspondingly, an emerging Spin-Orbit Torque Magnetic Random-Access-Memory (SOT-MRAM) based Processing-In-Memory (PIM) accelerator will also be discussed for such dynamic neural network structure. 

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2. Non-uniform DNN Structured Subnets Sampling for Dynamic Inference

   https://doi.org/10.1109/DAC18072.2020.9218736  

   Yang, Li; He, Zhezhi; Cao, Yu; Fan, Deliang (July 2020, 2020 57th ACM/IEEE Design Automation Conference (DAC))

   null (Ed.)

   With the success of Deep Neural Networks (DNN), many recent works have been focusing on developing hardware accelerator for power and resource-limited system via model compression techniques, such as quantization, pruning, low-rank approximation and etc. However, almost all existing compressed DNNs are fixed after deployment, which lacks run-time adaptive structure to adapt to its dynamic hardware resource allocation, power budget, throughput requirement, as well as dynamic workload. As the countermeasure, to construct a novel run-time dynamic DNN structure, we propose a novel DNN sub-network sampling method via non-uniform channel selection for subnets generation. Thus, user can trade off between power, speed, computing load and accuracy on-the-fly after the deployment, depending on the dynamic requirements or specifications of the given system. We verify the proposed model on both CIFAR-10 and ImageNet dataset using ResNets, which outperforms the same sub-nets trained individually and other related works. It shows that, our method can achieve latency trade-off among 13.4, 24.6, 41.3, 62.1(ms) and 30.5, 38.7, 51, 65.4(ms) for GPU with 128 batch-size and CPU respectively on ImageNet using ResNet18. 

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3. Dynamic Neural Network to Enable Run-Time Trade-off between Accuracy and Latency

   https://doi.org/10.1145/3394885.3431628  

   Yang, Li; Fan, Deliang (January 2021, 2021 26th Asia and South Pacific Design Automation Conference (ASP-DAC))

   null (Ed.)

   To deploy powerful deep neural network (DNN) into smart, but resource limited IoT devices, many prior works have been proposed to compress DNN to reduce the network size and computation complexity with negligible accuracy degradation, such as weight quantization, network pruning, convolution decomposition, etc. However, by utilizing conventional DNN compression methods, a smaller, but fixed, network is generated from a relative large background model to achieve resource limited hardware acceleration. However, such optimization lacks the ability to adjust its structure in real-time to adapt for a dynamic computing hardware resource allocation and workloads. In this paper, we mainly review our two prior works [13], [15] to tackle this challenge, discussing how to construct a dynamic DNN by means of either uniform or non-uniform sub-nets generation methods. Moreover, to generate multiple non-uniform sub-nets, [15] needs to fully retrain the background model for each sub-net individually, named as multi-path method. To reduce the training cost, in this work, we further propose a single-path sub-nets generation method that can sample multiple sub-nets in different epochs within one training round. The constructed dynamic DNN, consisting of multiple sub-nets, provides the ability to run-time trade-off the inference accuracy and latency according to hardware resources and environment requirements. In the end, we study the the dynamic DNNs with different sub-nets generation methods on both CIFAR-10 and ImageNet dataset. We also present the run-time tuning of accuracy and latency on both GPU and CPU. 

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4. Deep-Dup: An Adversarial Weight Duplication Attack Framework to Crush Deep Neural Network in Multi-Tenant FPGA

   Rakin, Adnan Siraj; Luo, Yukui; Xu, Xiaolin; Fan, Deliang (August 2021, 30th USENIX Security Symposium)

   The wide deployment of Deep Neural Networks (DNN) in high-performance cloud computing platforms brought to light multi-tenant cloud field-programmable gate arrays (FPGA) as a popular choice of accelerator to boost performance due to its hardware reprogramming flexibility. Such a multi-tenant FPGA setup for DNN acceleration potentially exposes DNN interference tasks under severe threat from malicious users. This work, to the best of our knowledge, is the first to explore DNN model vulnerabilities in multi-tenant FPGAs. We propose a novel adversarial attack framework: Deep-Dup, in which the adversarial tenant can inject adversarial faults to the DNN model in the victim tenant of FPGA. Specifically, she can aggressively overload the shared power distribution system of FPGA with malicious power-plundering circuits, achieving adversarial weight duplication (AWD) hardware attack that duplicates certain DNN weight packages during data transmission between off-chip memory and on-chip buffer, to hijack the DNN function of the victim tenant. Further, to identify the most vulnerable DNN weight packages for a given malicious objective, we propose a generic vulnerable weight package searching algorithm, called Progressive Differential Evolution Search (P-DES), which is, for the first time, adaptive to both deep learning white-box and black-box attack models. The proposed Deep-Dup is experimentally validated in a developed multi-tenant FPGA prototype, for two popular deep learning applications, i.e., Object Detection and Image Classification. Successful attacks are demonstrated in six popular DNN architectures (e.g., YOLOv2, ResNet-50, MobileNet, etc.) on three datasets (COCO, CIFAR-10, and ImageNet). 

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5. Tolerating Defects in Low-Power Neural Network Accelerators Via Retraining-Free Weight Approximation

   https://doi.org/10.1145/3477016  

   Hosseini, Fateme S.; Meng, Fanruo; Yang, Chengmo; Wen, Wujie; Cammarota, Rosario (October 2021, ACM Transactions on Embedded Computing Systems)

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   Hardware accelerators are essential to the accommodation of ever-increasing Deep Neural Network (DNN) workloads on the resource-constrained embedded devices. While accelerators facilitate fast and energy-efficient DNN operations, their accuracy is threatened by faults in their on-chip and off-chip memories, where millions of DNN weights are held. The use of emerging Non-Volatile Memories (NVM) further exposes DNN accelerators to a non-negligible rate of permanent defects due to immature fabrication, limited endurance, and aging. To tolerate defects in NVM-based DNN accelerators, previous work either requires extra redundancy in hardware or performs defect-aware retraining, imposing significant overhead. In comparison, this paper proposes a set of algorithms that exploit the flexibility in setting the fault-free bits in weight memory to effectively approximate weight values, so as to mitigate defect-induced accuracy drop. These algorithms can be applied as a one-step solution when loading the weights to embedded devices. They only require trivial hardware support and impose negligible run-time overhead. Experiments on popular DNN models show that the proposed techniques successfully boost inference accuracy even in the face of elevated defect rates in the weight memory. 

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