Bit Fusion: Bit-Level Dynamically Composable Architecture for Accelerating Deep Neural Networks

Fully realizing the potential of acceleration for Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) requires understanding and leveraging algorithmic properties. This paper builds upon the algorithmic insight that bitwidth of operations in DNNs can be reduced without compromising their classification accuracy. However, to prevent accuracy loss, the bitwidth varies significantly across DNNs and it may even be adjusted for each layer. Thus, a fixed-bitwidth accelerator would either offer limited benefits to accommodate the worst-case bitwidth requirements, or lead to a degradation in final accuracy. To alleviate these deficiencies, this work introduces dynamic bit-level fusion/decomposition as a new dimension in the design of DNN accelerators. We explore this dimension by designing Bit Fusion, a bit-flexible accelerator, that constitutes an array of bit-level processing elements that dynamically fuse to match the bitwidth of individual DNN layers. This flexibility in the architecture enables minimizing the computation and the communication at the finest granularity possible with no loss in accuracy. We evaluate the benefits of BitFusion using eight real-world feed-forward and recurrent DNNs. The proposed microarchitecture is implemented in Verilog and synthesized in 45 nm technology. Using the synthesis results and cycle accurate simulation, we compare the benefits of Bit Fusion to two state-of-the-art DNN accelerators, Eyeriss and Stripes. In the same area, frequency, and process technology, BitFusion offers 3.9x speedup and 5.1x energy savings over Eyeriss. Compared to Stripes, BitFusion provides 2.6x speedup and 3.9x energy reduction at 45 nm node when BitFusion area and frequency are set to those of Stripes. Scaling to GPU technology node of 16 nm, BitFusion almost matches the performance of a 250-Watt Titan Xp, which uses 8-bit vector instructions, while BitFusion merely consumes 895 milliwatts of power

Toolflows for Mapping Convolutional Neural Networks on FPGAs: A Survey and Future Directions

In the past decade, Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) have demonstrated state-of-the-art performance in various Artificial Intelligence tasks. To accelerate the experimentation and development of CNNs, several software frameworks have been released, primarily targeting power-hungry CPUs and GPUs. In this context, reconfigurable hardware in the form of FPGAs constitutes a potential alternative platform that can be integrated in the existing deep learning ecosystem to provide a tunable balance between performance, power consumption and programmability. In this paper, a survey of the existing CNN-to-FPGA toolflows is presented, comprising a comparative study of their key characteristics which include the supported applications, architectural choices, design space exploration methods and achieved performance. Moreover, major challenges and objectives introduced by the latest trends in CNN algorithmic research are identified and presented. Finally, a uniform evaluation methodology is proposed, aiming at the comprehensive, complete and in-depth evaluation of CNN-to-FPGA toolflows.Comment: Accepted for publication at the ACM Computing Surveys (CSUR) journal, 201

Fixed-point Factorized Networks

In recent years, Deep Neural Networks (DNN) based methods have achieved remarkable performance in a wide range of tasks and have been among the most powerful and widely used techniques in computer vision. However, DNN-based methods are both computational-intensive and resource-consuming, which hinders the application of these methods on embedded systems like smart phones. To alleviate this problem, we introduce a novel Fixed-point Factorized Networks (FFN) for pretrained models to reduce the computational complexity as well as the storage requirement of networks. The resulting networks have only weights of -1, 0 and 1, which significantly eliminates the most resource-consuming multiply-accumulate operations (MACs). Extensive experiments on large-scale ImageNet classification task show the proposed FFN only requires one-thousandth of multiply operations with comparable accuracy

HAQ: Hardware-Aware Automated Quantization with Mixed Precision

Model quantization is a widely used technique to compress and accelerate deep neural network (DNN) inference. Emergent DNN hardware accelerators begin to support mixed precision (1-8 bits) to further improve the computation efficiency, which raises a great challenge to find the optimal bitwidth for each layer: it requires domain experts to explore the vast design space trading off among accuracy, latency, energy, and model size, which is both time-consuming and sub-optimal. Conventional quantization algorithm ignores the different hardware architectures and quantizes all the layers in a uniform way. In this paper, we introduce the Hardware-Aware Automated Quantization (HAQ) framework which leverages the reinforcement learning to automatically determine the quantization policy, and we take the hardware accelerator's feedback in the design loop. Rather than relying on proxy signals such as FLOPs and model size, we employ a hardware simulator to generate direct feedback signals (latency and energy) to the RL agent. Compared with conventional methods, our framework is fully automated and can specialize the quantization policy for different neural network architectures and hardware architectures. Our framework effectively reduced the latency by 1.4-1.95x and the energy consumption by 1.9x with negligible loss of accuracy compared with the fixed bitwidth (8 bits) quantization. Our framework reveals that the optimal policies on different hardware architectures (i.e., edge and cloud architectures) under different resource constraints (i.e., latency, energy and model size) are drastically different. We interpreted the implication of different quantization policies, which offer insights for both neural network architecture design and hardware architecture design.Comment: CVPR 2019. The first three authors contributed equally to this work. Project page: https://hanlab.mit.edu/projects/haq