Matching Items (4)
Filtering by

Clear all filters

156610-Thumbnail Image.png
Description
Deep neural networks (DNN) have shown tremendous success in various cognitive tasks, such as image classification, speech recognition, etc. However, their usage on resource-constrained edge devices has been limited due to high computation and large memory requirement.

To overcome these challenges, recent works have extensively investigated model compression techniques such

Deep neural networks (DNN) have shown tremendous success in various cognitive tasks, such as image classification, speech recognition, etc. However, their usage on resource-constrained edge devices has been limited due to high computation and large memory requirement.

To overcome these challenges, recent works have extensively investigated model compression techniques such as element-wise sparsity, structured sparsity and quantization. While most of these works have applied these compression techniques in isolation, there have been very few studies on application of quantization and structured sparsity together on a DNN model.

This thesis co-optimizes structured sparsity and quantization constraints on DNN models during training. Specifically, it obtains optimal setting of 2-bit weight and 2-bit activation coupled with 4X structured compression by performing combined exploration of quantization and structured compression settings. The optimal DNN model achieves 50X weight memory reduction compared to floating-point uncompressed DNN. This memory saving is significant since applying only structured sparsity constraints achieves 2X memory savings and only quantization constraints achieves 16X memory savings. The algorithm has been validated on both high and low capacity DNNs and on wide-sparse and deep-sparse DNN models. Experiments demonstrated that deep-sparse DNN outperforms shallow-dense DNN with varying level of memory savings depending on DNN precision and sparsity levels. This work further proposed a Pareto-optimal approach to systematically extract optimal DNN models from a huge set of sparse and dense DNN models. The resulting 11 optimal designs were further evaluated by considering overall DNN memory which includes activation memory and weight memory. It was found that there is only a small change in the memory footprint of the optimal designs corresponding to the low sparsity DNNs. However, activation memory cannot be ignored for high sparsity DNNs.
ContributorsSrivastava, Gaurav (Author) / Seo, Jae-Sun (Thesis advisor) / Chakrabarti, Chaitali (Committee member) / Berisha, Visar (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2018
154757-Thumbnail Image.png
Description
Speech recognition and keyword detection are becoming increasingly popular applications for mobile systems. While deep neural network (DNN) implementation of these systems have very good performance,

they have large memory and compute resource requirements, making their implementation on a mobile device quite challenging. In this thesis, techniques to reduce the

Speech recognition and keyword detection are becoming increasingly popular applications for mobile systems. While deep neural network (DNN) implementation of these systems have very good performance,

they have large memory and compute resource requirements, making their implementation on a mobile device quite challenging. In this thesis, techniques to reduce the memory and computation cost

of keyword detection and speech recognition networks (or DNNs) are presented.

The first technique is based on representing all weights and biases by a small number of bits and mapping all nodal computations into fixed-point ones with minimal degradation in the

accuracy. Experiments conducted on the Resource Management (RM) database show that for the keyword detection neural network, representing the weights by 5 bits results in a 6 fold reduction in memory compared to a floating point implementation with very little loss in performance. Similarly, for the speech recognition neural network, representing the weights by 6 bits results in a 5 fold reduction in memory while maintaining an error rate similar to a floating point implementation. Additional reduction in memory is achieved by a technique called weight pruning,

where the weights are classified as sensitive and insensitive and the sensitive weights are represented with higher precision. A combination of these two techniques helps reduce the memory

footprint by 81 - 84% for speech recognition and keyword detection networks respectively.

Further reduction in memory size is achieved by judiciously dropping connections for large blocks of weights. The corresponding technique, termed coarse-grain sparsification, introduces

hardware-aware sparsity during DNN training, which leads to efficient weight memory compression and significant reduction in the number of computations during classification without

loss of accuracy. Keyword detection and speech recognition DNNs trained with 75% of the weights dropped and classified with 5-6 bit weight precision effectively reduced the weight memory

requirement by ~95% compared to a fully-connected network with double precision, while showing similar performance in keyword detection accuracy and word error rate.
ContributorsArunachalam, Sairam (Author) / Chakrabarti, Chaitali (Thesis advisor) / Seo, Jae-Sun (Thesis advisor) / Cao, Yu (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2016
155154-Thumbnail Image.png
Description
Achieving human level intelligence is a long-term goal for many Artificial Intelligence (AI) researchers. Recent developments in combining deep learning and reinforcement learning helped us to move a step forward in achieving this goal. Reinforcement learning using a delayed reward mechanism is an approach to machine intelligence which studies decision

Achieving human level intelligence is a long-term goal for many Artificial Intelligence (AI) researchers. Recent developments in combining deep learning and reinforcement learning helped us to move a step forward in achieving this goal. Reinforcement learning using a delayed reward mechanism is an approach to machine intelligence which studies decision making with control and how a decision making agent can learn to act optimally in an environment-unaware conditions.

Q-learning is one of the model-free reinforcement directed learning strategies which uses temporal differences to estimate the performances of state-action pairs called Q values. A simple implementation of Q-learning algorithm can be done using a Q table memory to store and update the Q values. However, with an increase in state space data due to a complex environment, and with an increase in possible number of actions an agent can perform, Q table reaches its space limit and would be difficult to scale well. Q-learning with neural networks eliminates the use of Q table by approximating the Q function using neural networks.

Autonomous agents need to develop cognitive properties and become self-adaptive to be deployable in any environment. Reinforcement learning with Q-learning have been very efficient in solving such problems. However, embedded systems like space rovers and autonomous robots rarely implement such techniques due to the constraints faced like processing power, chip area, convergence rate and cost of the chip. These problems present a need for a portable, low power, area efficient hardware accelerator to accelerate the process of such learning.

This problem is targeted by implementing a hardware schematic architecture for Q-learning using Artificial Neural networks. This architecture exploits the massive parallelism provided by neural network with a dedicated fine grain parallelism provided by a Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) thereby processing the Q values at a high throughput. Mars exploration rovers currently use Xilinx-Space-grade FPGA devices for image processing, pyrotechnic operation control and obstacle avoidance. The hardware resource consumption for the architecture has been synthesized considering Xilinx Virtex7 FPGA as the target device.
ContributorsGankidi, Pranay Reddy (Author) / Thangavelautham, Jekanthan (Thesis advisor) / Ren, Fengbo (Committee member) / Seo, Jae-Sun (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2016
157977-Thumbnail Image.png
Description
Deep neural networks (DNNs) have had tremendous success in a variety of

statistical learning applications due to their vast expressive power. Most

applications run DNNs on the cloud on parallelized architectures. There is a need

for for efficient DNN inference on edge with low precision hardware and analog

accelerators. To make trained models more

Deep neural networks (DNNs) have had tremendous success in a variety of

statistical learning applications due to their vast expressive power. Most

applications run DNNs on the cloud on parallelized architectures. There is a need

for for efficient DNN inference on edge with low precision hardware and analog

accelerators. To make trained models more robust for this setting, quantization and

analog compute noise are modeled as weight space perturbations to DNNs and an

information theoretic regularization scheme is used to penalize the KL-divergence

between perturbed and unperturbed models. This regularizer has similarities to

both natural gradient descent and knowledge distillation, but has the advantage of

explicitly promoting the network to and a broader minimum that is robust to

weight space perturbations. In addition to the proposed regularization,

KL-divergence is directly minimized using knowledge distillation. Initial validation

on FashionMNIST and CIFAR10 shows that the information theoretic regularizer

and knowledge distillation outperform existing quantization schemes based on the

straight through estimator or L2 constrained quantization.
ContributorsKadambi, Pradyumna (Author) / Berisha, Visar (Thesis advisor) / Dasarathy, Gautam (Committee member) / Seo, Jae-Sun (Committee member) / Cao, Yu (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2019