There have been many recent attempts to extend the successes of convolutional neural networks (CNNs) from 2-dimensional (2D) image classification to 3-dimensional (3D) video recognition by exploring 3D CNNs. Considering the emerging growth of mobile or Internet of Things (IoT) market, it is essential to investigate the deployment of 3D CNNs on edge devices. Previous works have implemented standard 3D CNNs (C3D) on hardware platforms, however, they have not exploited model compression for acceleration of inference. This work proposes a hardware-aware pruning approach that can fully adapt to the loop tiling technique of FPGA design and is applied onto a novel 3D network called R(2+1)D. Leveraging the powerful ADMM, the proposed pruning method achieves simultaneous high accuracy and significant acceleration of computation on FPGA. With layer-wise pruning rates up to 10× and negligible accuracy loss, the pruned model is implemented on a Xilinx ZCU102 FPGA board, where the pruned model achieves 2.6× speedup compared with the unpruned version, and 2.3× speedup and 2.3× power efficiency improvement compared with state-of-the-art FPGA implementation of C3D.
more »
« less
An Energy-Efficient Inference Method in Convolutional Neural Networks Based on Dynamic Adjustment of the Pruning Level
In this article, we present a low-energy inference method for convolutional neural networks in image classification applications. The lower energy consumption is achieved by using a highly pruned (lower-energy) network if the resulting network can provide a correct output. More specifically, the proposed inference method makes use of two pruned neural networks (NNs), namely mildly and aggressively pruned networks, which are both designed offline. In the system, a third NN makes use of the input data for the online selection of the appropriate pruned network. The third network, for its feature extraction, employs the same convolutional layers as those of the aggressively pruned NN, thereby reducing the overhead of the online management. There is some accuracy loss induced by the proposed method where, for a given level of accuracy, the energy gain of the proposed method is considerably larger than the case of employing any one pruning level. The proposed method is independent of both the pruning method and the network architecture. The efficacy of the proposed inference method is assessed on Eyeriss hardware accelerator platform for some of the state-of-the-art NN architectures. Our studies show that this method may provide, on average, 70% energy reduction compared to the original NN at the cost of about 3% accuracy loss on the CIFAR-10 dataset.
more »
« less
- Award ID(s):
- 1901440
- NSF-PAR ID:
- 10326528
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- ACM Transactions on Design Automation of Electronic Systems
- Volume:
- 26
- Issue:
- 6
- ISSN:
- 1084-4309
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 1 to 20
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
More Like this
-
-
Binary neural networks (BNNs) substitute complex arithmetic operations with simple bit-wise operations. The binarized weights and activations in BNNs can drastically reduce memory requirement and energy consumption, making it attractive for edge ML applications with limited resources. However, the severe memory capacity and energy constraints of low-power edge devices call for further reduction of BNN models beyond binarization. Weight pruning is a proven solution for reducing the size of many neural network (NN) models, but the binary nature of BNN weights make it difficult to identify insignificant weights to remove. In this paper, we present a pruning method based on latent weight with layer-level pruning sensitivity analysis which reduces the over-parameterization of BNNs, allowing for accuracy gains while drastically reducing the model size. Our method advocates for a heuristics that distinguishes weights by their latent weights, a real-valued vector used to compute the pseudogradient during backpropagation. It is tested using three different convolutional NNs on the MNIST, CIFAR-10, and Imagenette datasets with results indicating a 33%--46% reduction in operation count, with no accuracy loss, improving upon previous works in accuracy, model size, and total operation count.more » « less
-
Model compression is an important technique to facilitate efficient embedded and hardware implementations of deep neural networks (DNNs), a number of prior works are dedicated to model compression techniques. The target is to simultaneously reduce the model storage size and accelerate the computation, with minor effect on accuracy. Two important categories of DNN model compression techniques are weight pruning and weight quantization. The former leverages the redundancy in the number of weights, whereas the latter leverages the redundancy in bit representation of weights. These two sources of redundancy can be combined, thereby leading to a higher degree of DNN model compression. However, a systematic framework of joint weight pruning and quantization of DNNs is lacking, thereby limiting the available model compression ratio. Moreover, the computation reduction, energy efficiency improvement, and hardware performance overhead need to be accounted besides simply model size reduction, and the hardware performance overhead resulted from weight pruning method needs to be taken into consideration. To address these limitations, we present ADMM-NN, the first algorithm-hardware co-optimization framework of DNNs using Alternating Direction Method of Multipliers (ADMM), a powerful technique to solve non-convex optimization problems with possibly combinatorial constraints. The first part of ADMM-NN is a systematic, joint framework of DNN weight pruning and quantization using ADMM. It can be understood as a smart regularization technique with regularization target dynamically updated in each ADMM iteration, thereby resulting in higher performance in model compression than the state-of-the-art. The second part is hardware-aware DNN optimizations to facilitate hardware-level implementations. We perform ADMM-based weight pruning and quantization considering (i) the computation reduction and energy efficiency improvement, and (ii) the hardware performance overhead due to irregular sparsity. The first requirement prioritizes the convolutional layer compression over fully-connected layers, while the latter requires a concept of the break-even pruning ratio, defined as the minimum pruning ratio of a specific layer that results in no hardware performance degradation. Without accuracy loss, ADMM-NN achieves 85× and 24× pruning on LeNet-5 and AlexNet models, respectively, --- significantly higher than the state-of-the-art. The improvements become more significant when focusing on computation reduction. Combining weight pruning and quantization, we achieve 1,910× and 231× reductions in overall model size on these two benchmarks, when focusing on data storage. Highly promising results are also observed on other representative DNNs such as VGGNet and ResNet-50. We release codes and models at https://github.com/yeshaokai/admm-nn.more » « less
-
Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) are becoming increasingly deeper, wider, and non-linear because of the growing demand on prediction accuracy and analysis quality. The wide and deep CNNs, however, require a large amount of computing resources and processing time. Many previous works have studied model pruning to improve inference performance, but little work has been done for effectively reducing training cost. In this paper, we propose ClickTrain: an efficient and accurate end-to-end training and pruning framework for CNNs. Different from the existing pruning-during-training work, ClickTrain provides higher model accuracy and compression ratio via fine-grained architecture-preserving pruning. By leveraging pattern-based pruning with our proposed novel accurate weight importance estimation, dynamic pattern generation and selection, and compiler-assisted computation optimizations, ClickTrain generates highly accurate and fast pruned CNN models for direct deployment without any extra time overhead, compared with the baseline training. ClickTrain also reduces the end-to-end time cost of the pruning-after-training method by up to 2.3X with comparable accuracy and compression ratio. Moreover, compared with the state-of-the-art pruning-during-training approach, ClickTrain provides significant improvements both accuracy and compression ratio on the tested CNN models and datasets, under similar limited training time.more » « less
-
While Volatile Organic Compounds (VOC) and ammonia have a place in our daily lives, their leakage into the environment is harmful to human health. In order to prevent and detect gaseous leaks of harmful VOCs, a cyber-physical system (CPS) comprised of ordinary people or first responders is proposed. This CPS uses small, low-cost sensors coupled to smart phones or mobile devices with the necessary computation and communication capabilities. The efficacy of such a CPS hinges on its ability to address technical challenges stemming from the fact that identically produced sensors may produce different results under the same conditions due to sensor drift, noise, or resolution errors. The proposed system makes use of time-varying signals produced by sensors to detect gas leaks. Sensors sample the gas vapor level in a continuous manner and time-varying sensor data is processed using deep neural networks. One of the neural networks (NN) is an energy efficient Additive Neural Network (AddNet) which can be implemented in host devices. The second NN is the discriminator of a GAN and the third a regular convolutional NN. AddNet produces comparable VOC gas leak detection results to regular convolutional networks while reducing area requirements by two thirds.more » « less
- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
-
Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Journal Article:
- https://doi.org/10.1145/3460972
