Network quantization is one of the most hardware friendly techniques to enable the deployment of convolutional neural networks (CNNs) on low-power mobile devices. Recent network quantization techniques quantize each weight kernel in a convolutional layer independently for higher inference accuracy, since the weight kernels in a layer exhibit different variances and hence have different amounts of redundancy. The quantization bitwidth or bit number (QBN) directly decides the inference accuracy, latency, energy and hardware overhead. To effectively reduce the redundancy and accelerate CNN inferences, various weight kernels should be quantized with different QBNs. However, prior works use only one QBN to quantize each convolutional layer or the entire CNN, because the design space of searching a QBN for each weight kernel is too large. The hand-crafted heuristic of the kernel-wise QBN search is so sophisticated that domain experts can obtain only sub-optimal results. It is difficult for even deep reinforcement learning (DRL) DDPG-based agents to find a kernel-wise QBN configuration that can achieve reasonable inference accuracy. In this paper, we propose a hierarchical-DRL-based kernel-wise network quantization technique, AutoQ, to automatically search a QBN for each weight kernel, and choose another QBN for each activation layer. Compared to the models quantized by the state-of-the-art DRL-based schemes, on average, the same models quantized by AutoQ reduce the inference latency by 54.06%, and decrease the inference energy consumption by 50.69%, while achieving the same inference accuracy.
more »
« less
ACE-SNN: Algorithm-Hardware Co-design of Energy-Efficient & Low-Latency Deep Spiking Neural Networks for 3D Image Recognition
High-quality 3D image recognition is an important component of many vision and robotics systems. However, the accurate processing of these images requires the use of compute-expensive 3D Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs). To address this challenge, we propose the use of Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) that are generated from iso-architecture CNNs and trained with quantization-aware gradient descent to optimize their weights, membrane leak, and firing thresholds. During both training and inference, the analog pixel values of a 3D image are directly applied to the input layer of the SNN without the need to convert to a spike-train. This significantly reduces the training and inference latency and results in high degree of activation sparsity, which yields significant improvements in computational efficiency. However, this introduces energy-hungry digital multiplications in the first layer of our models, which we propose to mitigate using a processing-in-memory (PIM) architecture. To evaluate our proposal, we propose a 3D and a 3D/2D hybrid SNN-compatible convolutional architecture and choose hyperspectral imaging (HSI) as an application for 3D image recognition. We achieve overall test accuracy of 98.68, 99.50, and 97.95% with 5 time steps (inference latency) and 6-bit weight quantization on the Indian Pines, Pavia University, and Salinas Scene datasets, respectively. In particular, our models implemented using standard digital hardware achieved accuracies similar to state-of-the-art (SOTA) with ~560.6× and ~44.8× less average energy than an iso-architecture full-precision and 6-bit quantized CNN, respectively. Adopting the PIM architecture in the first layer, further improves the average energy, delay, and energy-delay-product (EDP) by 30, 7, and 38%, respectively.
more »
« less
- Award ID(s):
- 1763747
- NSF-PAR ID:
- 10345282
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Frontiers in Neuroscience
- Volume:
- 16
- ISSN:
- 1662-453X
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
More Like this
-
-
Precise monitoring of respiratory rate in premature newborn infants is essential to initiating medical interventions as required. Wired technologies can be invasive and obtrusive to the patients. We propose a deep-learning-enabled wearable monitoring system for premature newborn infants, where respiratory cessation is predicted using signals that are collected wirelessly from a non-invasive wearable Bellypatch put on the infant’s body. We propose a five-stage design pipeline involving data collection and labeling, feature scaling, deep learning model selection with hyperparameter tuning, model training and validation, and model testing and deployment. The model used is a 1-D convolutional neural network (1DCNN) architecture with one convolution layer, one pooling layer, and three fully-connected layers, achieving 97.15% classification accuracy. To address the energy limitations of wearable processing, several quantization techniques are explored, and their performance and energy consumption are analyzed for the respiratory classification task. Results demonstrate a reduction of energy footprints and model storage overhead with a considerable degradation of the classification accuracy, meaning that quantization and other model compression techniques are not the best solution for respiratory classification problem on wearable devices. To improve accuracy while reducing the energy consumption, we propose a novel spiking neural network (SNN)-based respiratory classification solution, which can be implemented on event-driven neuromorphic hardware platforms. To this end, we propose an approach to convert the analog operations of our baseline trained 1DCNN to their spiking equivalent. We perform a design-space exploration using the parameters of the converted SNN to generate inference solutions having different accuracy and energy footprints. We select a solution that achieves an accuracy of 93.33% with 18x lower energy compared to the baseline 1DCNN model. Additionally, the proposed SNN solution achieves similar accuracy as the quantized model with a 4× lower energy.more » « less
-
This paper presents a Ferroelectric FET (FeFET) based processing-in-memory (PIM) architecture to accelerate inference of deep neural networks (DNNs). We propose a digital in-memory vector-matrix multiplication (VMM) engine design utilizing the FeFET crossbar to enables bit-parallel computation and eliminate analog-to-digital conversion in prior mixed-signal PIM designs. A dedicated hierarchical network-on-chip (H-NoC) is developed for input broadcasting and on-the-fly partial results processing, reducing the data transmission volume and latency. Simulations in 28nm CMOS technology show 115x and 6.3x higher computing efficiency (GOPs/W) over desktop GPU (Nvidia GTX 1080Ti) and ReRAM based design, respectively.more » « less
-
null (Ed.)PIM (processing-in-memory) based hardware accelerators have shown great potentials in addressing the computation and memory access intensity of modern CNNs (convolutional neural networks). While adopting NVM (non-volatile memory) helps to further mitigate the storage and energy consumption overhead, adopting quantization, e.g., shift-based quantization, helps to tradeoff the computation overhead and the accuracy loss, integrating both NVM and quantization in hardware accelerators leads to sub-optimal acceleration. In this paper, we exploit the natural shift property of DWM (domain wall memory) to devise DWMAcc, a DWM-based accelerator with asymmetrical storage of weight and input data, to speed up the inference phase of shift-based CNNs. DWMAcc supports flexible shift operations to enable fast processing with low performance and area overhead. We then optimize it with zero-sharing , input-reuse , and weight-share schemes. Our experimental results show that, on average, DWMAcc achieves 16.6× performance improvement and 85.6× energy consumption reduction over a state-of-the-art SRAM based design.more » « less
-
This paper addresses the design of accelerators using systolic architectures to train convolutional neural networks using a novel gradient interleaving approach. Training the neural network involves computation and backpropagation of gradients of error with respect to the activation functions and weights. It is shown that the gradient with respect to the activation function can be computed using a weight-stationary systolic array, while the gradient with respect to the weights can be computed using an output-stationary systolic array. The novelty of the proposed approach lies in interleaving the computations of these two gradients on the same configurable systolic array. This results in the reuse of the variables from one computation to the other and eliminates unnecessary memory accesses and energy consumption associated with these memory accesses. The proposed approach leads to 1.4−2.2× savings in terms of the number of cycles and 1.9× savings in terms of memory accesses in the fully-connected layer. Furthermore, the proposed method uses up to 25% fewer cycles and memory accesses, and 16% less energy than baseline implementations for state-of-the-art CNNs. Under iso-area comparisons, for Inception-v4, compared to weight-stationary (WS), Intergrad achieves 12% savings in energy, 17% savings in memory, and 4% savings in cycles. Savings for Densenet-264 are 18% , 26% , and 27% with respect to energy, memory, and cycles, respectively. Thus, the proposed novel accelerator architecture reduces the latency and energy consumption for training deep neural networks.more » « less
- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
-
Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Journal Article:
- https://doi.org/10.3389/fnins.2022.815258
