skip to main content
US FlagAn official website of the United States government
dot gov icon
Official websites use .gov
A .gov website belongs to an official government organization in the United States.
https lock icon
Secure .gov websites use HTTPS
A lock ( lock ) or https:// means you've safely connected to the .gov website. Share sensitive information only on official, secure websites.

Explore Research Products in the PAR
It may take a few hours for recently added research products to appear in PAR search results.


Title: ULEEN: A Novel Architecture for Ultra-low-energy Edge Neural Networks
‘‘Extreme edge”1devices, such as smart sensors, are a uniquely challenging environment for the deployment of machine learning. The tiny energy budgets of these devices lie beyond what is feasible for conventional deep neural networks, particularly in high-throughput scenarios, requiring us to rethink how we approach edge inference. In this work, we propose ULEEN, a model and FPGA-based accelerator architecture based on weightless neural networks (WNNs). WNNs eliminate energy-intensive arithmetic operations, instead using table lookups to perform computation, which makes them theoretically well-suited for edge inference. However, WNNs have historically suffered from poor accuracy and excessive memory usage. ULEEN incorporates algorithmic improvements and a novel training strategy inspired by binary neural networks (BNNs) to make significant strides in addressing these issues. We compare ULEEN against BNNs in software and hardware using the four MLPerf Tiny datasets and MNIST. Our FPGA implementations of ULEEN accomplish classification at 4.0–14.3 million inferences per second, improving area-normalized throughput by an average of 3.6× and steady-state energy efficiency by an average of 7.1× compared to the FPGA-based Xilinx FINN BNN inference platform. While ULEEN is not a universally applicable machine learning model, we demonstrate that it can be an excellent choice for certain applications in energy- and latency-critical edge environments.  more » « less
Award ID(s):
2326894
PAR ID:
10538343
Author(s) / Creator(s):
; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ;
Publisher / Repository:
ACM Digital Library
Date Published:
Journal Name:
ACM Transactions on Architecture and Code Optimization
Volume:
20
Issue:
4
ISSN:
1544-3566
Page Range / eLocation ID:
1 to 24
Format(s):
Medium: X
Sponsoring Org:
National Science Foundation
More Like this
  1. ; ; ; ; (, ICLR Workshop on Hardware Aware Efficient Training)
    Various hardware accelerators have been developed for energy-efficient and real-time inference of neural networks on edge devices. However, most training is done on high-performance GPUs or servers, and the huge memory and computing costs prevent training neural networks on edge devices. This paper proposes a novel tensor-based training framework, which offers orders-of-magnitude memory reduction in the training process. We propose a novel rank-adaptive tensorized neural network model, and design a hardware-friendly low-precision algorithm to train this model. We present an FPGA accelerator to demonstrate the benefits of this training method on edge devices. Our preliminary FPGA implementation achieves 59× speedup and 123× energy reduction compared to embedded CPU, and 292× memory reduction over a standard full-size training. 
    more » « less
  2. ; ; ; ; ; (, ACM Transactions on Reconfigurable Technology and Systems)
    Convolutional neural network (CNN)-based object detection has achieved very high accuracy; e.g., single-shot multi-box detectors (SSDs) can efficiently detect and localize various objects in an input image. However, they require a high amount of computation and memory storage, which makes it difficult to perform efficient inference on resource-constrained hardware devices such as drones or unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). Drone/UAV detection is an important task for applications including surveillance, defense, and multi-drone self-localization and formation control. In this article, we designed and co-optimized an algorithm and hardware for energy-efficient drone detection on resource-constrained FPGA devices. We trained an SSD object detection algorithm with a custom drone dataset. For inference, we employed low-precision quantization and adapted the width of the SSD CNN model. To improve throughput, we use dual-data rate operations for DSPs to effectively double the throughput with limited DSP counts. For different SSD algorithm models, we analyze accuracy or mean average precision (mAP) and evaluate the corresponding FPGA hardware utilization, DRAM communication, and throughput optimization. We evaluated the FPGA hardware for a custom drone dataset, Pascal VOC, and COCO2017. Our proposed design achieves a high mAP of 88.42% on the multi-drone dataset, with a high energy efficiency of 79 GOPS/W and throughput of 158 GOPS using the Xilinx Zynq ZU3EG FPGA device on the Open Vision Computer version 3 (OVC3) platform. Our design achieves 1.1 to 8.7× higher energy efficiency than prior works that used the same Pascal VOC dataset, using the same FPGA device, but at a low-power consumption of 2.54 W. For the COCO dataset, our MobileNet-V1 implementation achieved an mAP of 16.8, and 4.9 FPS/W for energy-efficiency, which is ∼ 1.9× higher than prior FPGA works or other commercial hardware platforms. 
    more » « less
  3. ; ; ; ; ; ; (, Proceedings of Machine Learning Research)
    We introduce the Differentiable Weightless Neural Network (DWN), a model based on interconnected lookup tables. Training of DWNs is enabled by a novel Extended Finite Difference technique for approximate differentiation of binary values. We propose Learnable Mapping, Learnable Reduction, and Spectral Regularization to further improve the accuracy and efficiency of these models. We evaluate DWNs in three edge computing contexts: (1) an FPGA-based hardware accelerator, where they demonstrate superior latency, throughput, energy efficiency, and model area compared to state-of-the-art solutions, (2) a low-power microcontroller, where they achieve preferable accuracy to XGBoost while subject to stringent memory constraints, and (3) ultra-low-cost chips, where they consistently outperform small models in both accuracy and projected hardware area. DWNs also compare favorably against leading approaches for tabular datasets, with higher average rank. Overall, our work positions DWNs as a pioneering solution for edge-compatible high-throughput neural networks. 
    more » « less
  4. ; ; ; (, ACM Transactions on Embedded Computing Systems)
    Domain specific neural network accelerators have garnered attention because of their improved energy efficiency and inference performance compared to CPUs and GPUs. Such accelerators are thus well suited for resource-constrained embedded systems. However, mapping sophisticated neural network models on these accelerators still entails significant energy and memory consumption, along with high inference time overhead. Binarized neural networks (BNNs), which utilize single-bit weights, represent an efficient way to implement and deploy neural network models on accelerators. In this paper, we present a novel optical-domain BNN accelerator, named ROBIN , which intelligently integrates heterogeneous microring resonator optical devices with complementary capabilities to efficiently implement the key functionalities in BNNs. We perform detailed fabrication-process variation analyses at the optical device level, explore efficient corrective tuning for these devices, and integrate circuit-level optimization to counter thermal variations. As a result, our proposed ROBIN architecture possesses the desirable traits of being robust, energy-efficient, low latency, and high throughput, when executing BNN models. Our analysis shows that ROBIN can outperform the best-known optical BNN accelerators and many electronic accelerators. Specifically, our energy-efficient ROBIN design exhibits energy-per-bit values that are ∼4 × lower than electronic BNN accelerators and ∼933 × lower than a recently proposed photonic BNN accelerator, while a performance-efficient ROBIN design shows ∼3 × and ∼25 × better performance than electronic and photonic BNN accelerators, respectively. 
    more » « less
  5. ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; et al (, ACM Transactions on Embedded Computing Systems)
    Efficient deployment of Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) on edge devices (i.e., FPGAs and mobile platforms) is very challenging, especially under a recent witness of the increasing DNN model size and complexity. Model compression strategies, including weight quantization and pruning, are widely recognized as effective approaches to significantly reduce computation and memory intensities, and have been implemented in many DNNs on edge devices. However, most state-of-the-art works focus on ad-hoc optimizations, and there lacks a thorough study to comprehensively reveal the potentials and constraints of different edge devices when considering different compression strategies. In this paper, we qualitatively and quantitatively compare the energy efficiency of FPGA-based and mobile-based DNN executions using mobile GPU and provide a detailed analysis. Based on the observations obtained from the analysis, we propose a unified optimization framework using block-based pruning to reduce the weight storage and accelerate the inference speed on mobile devices and FPGAs, achieving high hardware performance and energy-efficiency gain while maintaining accuracy. 
    more » « less
  • Citation Formats
  • MLA
  • APA
  • Chicago
  • BibTeX
  • Save / Share this Record
  • Send to Email