https://www2.econ.iastate.edu/tesfatsi/DeepLearningInNeuralNetworksOverview.JSchmidhuber2015.pdf

Deep learning in neural networks

We propose two efficient approximations to standard convolutional neural networks: Binary-Weight-Networks and XNOR-Networks. In Binary-Weight-Networks, the filters are approximated with binary values resulting in 32\(\times \) memory saving. In XNOR-Networks, both the filters and the input to convolutional layers are binary. XNOR-Networks approximate convolutions using primarily binary operations. This results in 58\(\times \) faster convolutional operations (in terms of number of the high precision operations) and 32\(\times \) memory savings. XNOR-Nets offer the possibility of running state-of-the-art networks on CPUs (rather than GPUs) in real-time. Our binary networks are simple, accurate, efficient, and work on challenging visual tasks. We evaluate our approach on the ImageNet classification task. The classification accuracy with a Binary-Weight-Network version of AlexNet is the same as the full-precision AlexNet. We compare our method with recent network binarization methods, BinaryConnect and BinaryNets, and outperform these methods by large margins on ImageNet, more than \(16\,\%\) in top-1 accuracy. Our code is available at: http://allenai.org/plato/xnornet.

/pdf/xnor-net-imagenet-classification-using-binary-convolutional-393ghc3cqd.pdf

XNOR-Net: ImageNet Classification Using Binary Convolutional Neural Networks

State-of-the-art deep neural networks (DNNs) have hundreds of millions of connections and are both computationally and memory intensive, making them difficult to deploy on embedded systems with limited hardware resources and power budgets. While custom hardware helps the computation, fetching weights from DRAM is two orders of magnitude more expensive than ALU operations, and dominates the required power.Previously proposed 'Deep Compression' makes it possible to fit large DNNs (AlexNet and VGGNet) fully in on-chip SRAM. This compression is achieved by pruning the redundant connections and having multiple connections share the same weight. We propose an energy efficient inference engine (EIE) that performs inference on this compressed network model and accelerates the resulting sparse matrix-vector multiplication with weight sharing. Going from DRAM to SRAM gives EIE 120× energy saving; Exploiting sparsity saves 10×; Weight sharing gives 8×; Skipping zero activations from ReLU saves another 3×. Evaluated on nine DNN benchmarks, EIE is 189× and 13× faster when compared to CPU and GPU implementations of the same DNN without compression. EIE has a processing power of 102 GOPS working directly on a compressed network, corresponding to 3 TOPS on an uncompressed network, and processes FC layers of AlexNet at 1.88×104 frames/sec with a power dissipation of only 600mW. It is 24,000× and 3,400× more energy efficient than a CPU and GPU respectively. Compared with DaDianNao, EIE has 2.9×, 19× and 3× better throughput, energy efficiency and area efficiency.

EIE: efficient inference engine on compressed deep neural network

Information Theory and Reliable Communication

Deep neural networks (DNNs) are currently widely used for many artificial intelligence (AI) applications including computer vision, speech recognition, and robotics. While DNNs deliver state-of-the-art accuracy on many AI tasks, it comes at the cost of high computational complexity. Accordingly, techniques that enable efficient processing of DNNs to improve energy efficiency and throughput without sacrificing application accuracy or increasing hardware cost are critical to the wide deployment of DNNs in AI systems. This article aims to provide a comprehensive tutorial and survey about the recent advances toward the goal of enabling efficient processing of DNNs. Specifically, it will provide an overview of DNNs, discuss various hardware platforms and architectures that support DNNs, and highlight key trends in reducing the computation cost of DNNs either solely via hardware design changes or via joint hardware design and DNN algorithm changes. It will also summarize various development resources that enable researchers and practitioners to quickly get started in this field, and highlight important benchmarking metrics and design considerations that should be used for evaluating the rapidly growing number of DNN hardware designs, optionally including algorithmic codesigns, being proposed in academia and industry. The reader will take away the following concepts from this article: understand the key design considerations for DNNs; be able to evaluate different DNN hardware implementations with benchmarks and comparison metrics; understand the tradeoffs between various hardware architectures and platforms; be able to evaluate the utility of various DNN design techniques for efficient processing; and understand recent implementation trends and opportunities.

Efficient Processing of Deep Neural Networks: A Tutorial and Survey

Neural network processing hardware using parallel computational architectures with reconfigurable core-level and vector-level parallelism is provided. In various embodiments, a neural network model memory is adapted to store a neural network model comprising a plurality of layers. Each layer has at least one dimension and comprises a plurality of synaptic weights. A plurality of neural cores is provided. Each neural core includes a computation unit and an activation memory. The computation unit is adapted to apply a plurality of synaptic weights to a plurality of input activations to produce a plurality of output activations. The computation unit has a plurality of vector units. The activation memory is adapted to store the input activations and the output activations. The system is adapted to partition the plurality of cores into a plurality of partitions based on dimensions of the layer and the vector units.

Parallel computational architecture with reconfigurable core-level and vector-level parallelism

Neural inference processors are provided. In various embodiments, a processor includes a plurality of cores. Each core includes a neural computation unit, an activation memory, and a local controller. The neural computation unit is adapted to apply a plurality of synaptic weights to a plurality of input activations to produce a plurality of output activations. The activation memory is adapted to store the input activations and the output activations. The local controller is adapted to load the input activations from the activation memory to the neural computation unit and to store the plurality of output activations from the neural computation unit to the activation memory. The processor includes a neural network model memory adapted to store network parameters, including the plurality of synaptic weights. The processor includes a global scheduler operatively coupled to the plurality of cores, adapted to provide the synaptic weights from the neural network model memory to each core.

Rathinakumar Appuswamy

Papers

Parallel computational architecture with reconfigurable core-level and vector-level parallelism

Central scheduler and instruction dispatcher for a neural inference processor