FINN: A Framework for Fast, Scalable Binarized Neural Network Inference

Research has shown that convolutional neural networks contain significant redundancy, and high classification accuracy can be obtained even when weights and activations are reduced from floating point to binary values. In this paper, we present FINN, a framework for building fast and flexible FPGA accelerators using a flexible heterogeneous streaming architecture. By utilizing a novel set of optimizations that enable efficient mapping of binarized neural networks to hardware, we implement fully connected, convolutional and pooling layers, with per-layer compute resources being tailored to user-provided throughput requirements. On a ZC706 embedded FPGA platform drawing less than 25 W total system power, we demonstrate up to 12.3 million image classifications per second with 0.31 {\mu}s latency on the MNIST dataset with 95.8% accuracy, and 21906 image classifications per second with 283 {\mu}s latency on the CIFAR-10 and SVHN datasets with respectively 80.1% and 94.9% accuracy. To the best of our knowledge, ours are the fastest classification rates reported to date on these benchmarks.Comment: To appear in the 25th International Symposium on Field-Programmable Gate Arrays, February 201

Comparison of Classifiers for Radar Emitter Type Identification

ARTMAP neural network classifiers are considered for the identification of radar emitter types from their waveform parameters. These classifiers can represent radar emitter type classes with one or more prototypes, perform on-line incremental learning to account for novelty encountered in the field, and process radar pulse streams at high speed, making them attractive for real-time applications such as electronic support measures (ESM). The performance of four ARTMAP variants- ARTMAP (Stage 1), ARTMAP-IC, fuzzy ARTMAP and Gaussian ARTMAP - is assessed with radar data gathered in the field. The k nearest neighbor (kNN) and radial basis function (RDF) classifiers are used for reference. Simulation results indicate that fuzzy ARTMAP and Gaussian ARTMAP achieve an average classification rate consistently higher than that of the other ARTMAP classifers and comparable to that of kNN and RBF. ART-EMAP, ARTMAP-IC and fuzzy ARTMAP require fewer training epochs than Gaussian ARTMAP and RBF, and substantially fewer prototype vectors (thus, smaller physical memory requirements and faster fielded performance) than Gaussian ARTMAP, RBF and kNN. Overall, fuzzy ART MAP performs at least as well as the other classifiers in both accuracy and computational complexity, and better than each of them in at least one of these aspects of performance. Incorporation into fuzzy ARTMAP of the MT- feature of ARTMAP-IC is found to be essential for convergence during on-line training with this data set.Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and the Office of Naval Research (N000I4-95-1-409 (S.G. and M.A.R.); National Science Foundation (IRI-97-20333) (S.G.); Natural Science and Engineering Research Council of Canada (E.G.); Office of Naval Research (N00014-95-1-0657

Adaptive Resonance Theory: Self-Organizing Networks for Stable Learning, Recognition, and Prediction

Adaptive Resonance Theory (ART) is a neural theory of human and primate information processing and of adaptive pattern recognition and prediction for technology. Biological applications to attentive learning of visual recognition categories by inferotemporal cortex and hippocampal system, medial temporal amnesia, corticogeniculate synchronization, auditory streaming, speech recognition, and eye movement control are noted. ARTMAP systems for technology integrate neural networks, fuzzy logic, and expert production systems to carry out both unsupervised and supervised learning. Fast and slow learning are both stable response to large non stationary databases. Match tracking search conjointly maximizes learned compression while minimizing predictive error. Spatial and temporal evidence accumulation improve accuracy in 3-D object recognition. Other applications are noted.Office of Naval Research (N00014-95-I-0657, N00014-95-1-0409, N00014-92-J-1309, N00014-92-J4015); National Science Foundation (IRI-94-1659

Dimension reduction for linear separation with curvilinear distances

Any high dimensional data in its original raw form may contain obviously classifiable clusters which are difficult to identify given the high-dimension representation. In reducing the dimensions it may be possible to perform a simple classification technique to extract this cluster information whilst retaining the overall topology of the data set. The supervised method presented here takes a high dimension data set consisting of multiple clusters and employs curvilinear distance as a relation between points, projecting in a lower dimension according to this relationship. This representation allows for linear separation of the non-separable high dimensional cluster data and the classification to a cluster of any successive unseen data point extracted from the same higher dimension

Integrating Symbolic and Neural Processing in a Self-Organizing Architechture for Pattern Recognition and Prediction

British Petroleum (89A-1204); Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (N00014-92-J-4015); National Science Foundation (IRI-90-00530); Office of Naval Research (N00014-91-J-4100); Air Force Office of Scientific Research (F49620-92-J-0225