Predefined Sparseness in Recurrent Sequence Models

Inducing sparseness while training neural networks has been shown to yield models with a lower memory footprint but similar effectiveness to dense models. However, sparseness is typically induced starting from a dense model, and thus this advantage does not hold during training. We propose techniques to enforce sparseness upfront in recurrent sequence models for NLP applications, to also benefit training. First, in language modeling, we show how to increase hidden state sizes in recurrent layers without increasing the number of parameters, leading to more expressive models. Second, for sequence labeling, we show that word embeddings with predefined sparseness lead to similar performance as dense embeddings, at a fraction of the number of trainable parameters.Comment: the SIGNLL Conference on Computational Natural Language Learning (CoNLL, 2018

SuperNeurons: Dynamic GPU Memory Management for Training Deep Neural Networks

Going deeper and wider in neural architectures improves the accuracy, while the limited GPU DRAM places an undesired restriction on the network design domain. Deep Learning (DL) practitioners either need change to less desired network architectures, or nontrivially dissect a network across multiGPUs. These distract DL practitioners from concentrating on their original machine learning tasks. We present SuperNeurons: a dynamic GPU memory scheduling runtime to enable the network training far beyond the GPU DRAM capacity. SuperNeurons features 3 memory optimizations, \textit{Liveness Analysis}, \textit{Unified Tensor Pool}, and \textit{Cost-Aware Recomputation}, all together they effectively reduce the network-wide peak memory usage down to the maximal memory usage among layers. We also address the performance issues in those memory saving techniques. Given the limited GPU DRAM, SuperNeurons not only provisions the necessary memory for the training, but also dynamically allocates the memory for convolution workspaces to achieve the high performance. Evaluations against Caffe, Torch, MXNet and TensorFlow have demonstrated that SuperNeurons trains at least 3.2432 deeper network than current ones with the leading performance. Particularly, SuperNeurons can train ResNet2500 that has $10^4$ basic network layers on a 12GB K40c.Comment: PPoPP '2018: 23nd ACM SIGPLAN Symposium on Principles and Practice of Parallel Programmin

Accelerating and pruning CNNs for semantic segmentation on FPGA

Semantic segmentation is one of the popular tasks in computer vision, providing pixel-wise annotations for scene understanding. However, segmentation-based convolutional neural networks require tremendous computational power. In this work, a fully-pipelined hardware accelerator with support for dilated convolution is introduced, which cuts down the redundant zero multiplications. Furthermore, we propose a genetic algorithm based automated channel pruning technique to jointly optimize computational complexity and model accuracy. Finally, hardware heuristics and an accurate model of the custom accelerator design enable a hardware-aware pruning framework. We achieve 2.44X lower latency with minimal degradation in semantic prediction quality (−1.98 pp lower mean intersection over union) compared to the baseline DeepLabV3+ model, evaluated on an Arria-10 FPGA. The binary files of the FPGA design, baseline and pruned models can be found in github.com/pierpaolomori/SemanticSegmentationFPGA