imani
LogHD: Robust Compression of Hyperdimensional Classifiers via Logarithmic Class-Axis Reduction
Yun, Sanggeon, Oh, Hyunwoo, Masukawa, Ryozo, Mercati, Pietro, Bastian, Nathaniel D., Imani, Mohsen
Hyperdimensional computing (HDC) suits memory, energy, and reliability-constrained systems, yet the standard "one prototype per class" design requires $O(CD)$ memory (with $C$ classes and dimensionality $D$). Prior compaction reduces $D$ (feature axis), improving storage/compute but weakening robustness. We introduce LogHD, a logarithmic class-axis reduction that replaces the $C$ per-class prototypes with $n\!\approx\!\lceil\log_k C\rceil$ bundle hypervectors (alphabet size $k$) and decodes in an $n$-dimensional activation space, cutting memory to $O(D\log_k C)$ while preserving $D$. LogHD uses a capacity-aware codebook and profile-based decoding, and composes with feature-axis sparsification. Across datasets and injected bit flips, LogHD attains competitive accuracy with smaller models and higher resilience at matched memory. Under equal memory, it sustains target accuracy at roughly $2.5$-$3.0\times$ higher bit-flip rates than feature-axis compression; an ASIC instantiation delivers $498\times$ energy efficiency and $62.6\times$ speedup over an AMD Ryzen 9 9950X and $24.3\times$/$6.58\times$ over an NVIDIA RTX 4090, and is $4.06\times$ more energy-efficient and $2.19\times$ faster than a feature-axis HDC ASIC baseline.
DecoHD: Decomposed Hyperdimensional Classification under Extreme Memory Budgets
Yun, Sanggeon, Oh, Hyunwoo, Masukawa, Ryozo, Imani, Mohsen
Decomposition is a proven way to shrink deep networks without changing I/O. We bring this idea to hyperdimensional computing (HDC), where footprint cuts usually shrink the feature axis and erode concentration and robustness. Prior HDC decompositions decode via fixed atomic hypervectors, which are ill-suited for compressing learned class prototypes. We introduce DecoHD, which learns directly in a decomposed HDC parameterization: a small, shared set of per-layer channels with multiplicative binding across layers and bundling at the end, yielding a large representational space from compact factors. DecoHD compresses along the class axis via a lightweight bundling head while preserving native bind-bundle-score; training is end-to-end, and inference remains pure HDC, aligning with in/near-memory accelerators. In evaluation, DecoHD attains extreme memory savings with only minor accuracy degradation under tight deployment budgets. On average it stays within about 0.1-0.15% of a strong non-reduced HDC baseline (worst case 5.7%), is more robust to random bit-flip noise, reaches its accuracy plateau with up to ~97% fewer trainable parameters, and -- in hardware -- delivers roughly 277x/35x energy/speed gains over a CPU (AMD Ryzen 9 9950X), 13.5x/3.7x over a GPU (NVIDIA RTX 4090), and 2.0x/2.4x over a baseline HDC ASIC.
ScalableHD: Scalable and High-Throughput Hyperdimensional Computing Inference on Multi-Core CPUs
Parikh, Dhruv, Prasanna, Viktor
Hyperdimensional Computing (HDC) is a brain-inspired computing paradigm that represents and manipulates information using high-dimensional vectors, called hypervectors (HV). Traditional HDC methods, while robust to noise and inherently parallel, rely on single-pass, non-parametric training and often suffer from low accuracy. To address this, recent approaches adopt iterative training of base and class HVs, typically accelerated on GPUs. Inference, however, remains lightweight and well-suited for real-time execution. Yet, efficient HDC inference has been studied almost exclusively on specialized hardware such as FPGAs and GPUs, with limited attention to general-purpose multi-core CPUs. To address this gap, we propose ScalableHD for scalable and high-throughput HDC inference on multi-core CPUs. ScalableHD employs a two-stage pipelined execution model, where each stage is parallelized across cores and processes chunks of base and class HVs. Intermediate results are streamed between stages using a producer-consumer mechanism, enabling on-the-fly consumption and improving cache locality. To maximize performance, ScalableHD integrates memory tiling and NUMA-aware worker-to-core binding. Further, it features two execution variants tailored for small and large batch sizes, each designed to exploit compute parallelism based on workload characteristics while mitigating the memory-bound compute pattern that limits HDC inference performance on modern multi-core CPUs. ScalableHD achieves up to 10x speedup in throughput (samples per second) over state-of-the-art baselines such as TorchHD, across a diverse set of tasks ranging from human activity recognition to image classification, while preserving task accuracy. Furthermore, ScalableHD exhibits robust scalability: increasing the number of cores yields near-proportional throughput improvements.
Exploiting Boosting in Hyperdimensional Computing for Enhanced Reliability in Healthcare
Jeong, SungHeon, Barkam, Hamza Errahmouni, Yun, Sanggeon, Kim, Yeseong, Angizi, Shaahin, Imani, Mohsen
Hyperdimensional computing (HDC) enables efficient data encoding and processing in high-dimensional space, benefiting machine learning and data analysis. However, underutilization of these spaces can lead to overfitting and reduced model reliability, especially in data-limited systems a critical issue in sectors like healthcare that demand robustness and consistent performance. We introduce BoostHD, an approach that applies boosting algorithms to partition the hyperdimensional space into subspaces, creating an ensemble of weak learners. By integrating boosting with HDC, BoostHD enhances performance and reliability beyond existing HDC methods. Our analysis highlights the importance of efficient utilization of hyperdimensional spaces for improved model performance. Experiments on healthcare datasets show that BoostHD outperforms state-of-the-art methods. On the WESAD dataset, it achieved an accuracy of 98.37%, surpassing Random Forest, XGBoost, and OnlineHD. BoostHD also demonstrated superior inference efficiency and stability, maintaining high accuracy under data imbalance and noise. In person-specific evaluations, it achieved an average accuracy of 96.19%, outperforming other models. By addressing the limitations of both boosting and HDC, BoostHD expands the applicability of HDC in critical domains where reliability and precision are paramount.
Privacy-Preserving Federated Learning with Differentially Private Hyperdimensional Computing
Piran, Fardin Jalil, Chen, Zhiling, Imani, Mohsen, Imani, Farhad
Federated Learning (FL) is essential for efficient data exchange in Internet of Things (IoT) environments, as it trains Machine Learning (ML) models locally and shares only model updates. However, FL is vulnerable to privacy threats like model inversion and membership inference attacks, which can expose sensitive training data. To address these privacy concerns, Differential Privacy (DP) mechanisms are often applied. Yet, adding DP noise to black-box ML models degrades performance, especially in dynamic IoT systems where continuous, lifelong FL learning accumulates excessive noise over time. To mitigate this issue, we introduce Federated HyperDimensional computing with Privacy-preserving (FedHDPrivacy), an eXplainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) framework that combines the neuro-symbolic paradigm with DP. FedHDPrivacy carefully manages the balance between privacy and performance by theoretically tracking cumulative noise from previous rounds and adding only the necessary incremental noise to meet privacy requirements. In a real-world case study involving in-process monitoring of manufacturing machining operations, FedHDPrivacy demonstrates robust performance, outperforming standard FL frameworks-including Federated Averaging (FedAvg), Federated Stochastic Gradient Descent (FedSGD), Federated Proximal (FedProx), Federated Normalized Averaging (FedNova), and Federated Adam (FedAdam)-by up to 38%. FedHDPrivacy also shows potential for future enhancements, such as multimodal data fusion.
Hyperdimensional Quantum Factorization
Poduval, Prathyush, Zou, Zhuowen, Velasquez, Alvaro, Imani, Mohsen
This paper presents a quantum algorithm for efficiently from components of the data are encoded into high-dimensional vectors decoding hypervectors, a crucial process in extracting atomic elements with brain-inspired properties [9, 13, 20, 19, 8]. The HDC operators from hypervectors--an essential task in Hyperdimensional - binding, bundling, and permutation - construct sets, associations, Computing (HDC) models for interpretable learning and information and sequences respectively, facilitating the interpretable creation retrieval. HDC employs high-dimensional vectors and efficient operators and manipulation of complex objects for data representation, to encode and manipulate information, representing complex learning, and processing. For learning, an HDC model makes decisions objects from atomic concepts. When one attempts to decode a hypervector by evaluating the similarity between query and model hypervectors that is the product (binding) of multiple hypervectors, the factorization [11, 26, 12, 18, 16]; for cognitive processing, an HDC model becomes prohibitively costly with classical optimizationbased retrieves information directly over the hyperspace with HDC operators; methods and specialized recurrent networks, an inherent consequence it then decodes the information with similarity functions and of the binding operation. We propose HDQF, an innovative the atomic hypervectors [9, 22, 30]. Recent work has shown great quantum computing approach, to address this challenge. By exploiting advantages of HDC in enhancing the cognitive capability of neural parallels between HDC and quantum computing and capitalizing networks in an explainable fashion [7]: a neural network learns to on quantum algorithms' speedup capabilities, HDQF encodes potential encode and perform HDC-like composition of the data over Raven's factors as a quantum superposition using qubit states and bipolar Progressive Matrix, a visual reasoning task over the symbolic attributes vector representation. This yields a quadratic speedup over classical of the objects, and significantly outperforms state-of-the-art search methods and effectively mitigates Hypervector Factorization pure DNN and neuro-symbolic AI solutions in both accuracy and capacity issues.
HDReason: Algorithm-Hardware Codesign for Hyperdimensional Knowledge Graph Reasoning
Chen, Hanning, Ni, Yang, Zakeri, Ali, Zou, Zhuowen, Yun, Sanggeon, Wen, Fei, Khaleghi, Behnam, Srinivasa, Narayan, Latapie, Hugo, Imani, Mohsen
In recent times, a plethora of hardware accelerators have been put forth for graph learning applications such as vertex classification and graph classification. However, previous works have paid little attention to Knowledge Graph Completion (KGC), a task that is well-known for its significantly higher algorithm complexity. The state-of-the-art KGC solutions based on graph convolution neural network (GCN) involve extensive vertex/relation embedding updates and complicated score functions, which are inherently cumbersome for acceleration. As a result, existing accelerator designs are no longer optimal, and a novel algorithm-hardware co-design for KG reasoning is needed. Recently, brain-inspired HyperDimensional Computing (HDC) has been introduced as a promising solution for lightweight machine learning, particularly for graph learning applications. In this paper, we leverage HDC for an intrinsically more efficient and acceleration-friendly KGC algorithm. We also co-design an acceleration framework named HDReason targeting FPGA platforms. On the algorithm level, HDReason achieves a balance between high reasoning accuracy, strong model interpretability, and less computation complexity. In terms of architecture, HDReason offers reconfigurability, high training throughput, and low energy consumption. When compared with NVIDIA RTX 4090 GPU, the proposed accelerator achieves an average 10.6x speedup and 65x energy efficiency improvement. When conducting cross-models and cross-platforms comparison, HDReason yields an average 4.2x higher performance and 3.4x better energy efficiency with similar accuracy versus the state-of-the-art FPGA-based GCN training platform.
Towards Efficient Hyperdimensional Computing Using Photonics
Fayza, Farbin, Demirkiran, Cansu, Chen, Hanning, Liu, Che-Kai, Mohan, Avi, Errahmouni, Hamza, Yun, Sanggeon, Imani, Mohsen, Zhang, David, Bunandar, Darius, Joshi, Ajay
Over the past few years, silicon photonics-based computing has emerged as a promising alternative to CMOS-based computing for Deep Neural Networks (DNN). Unfortunately, the non-linear operations and the high-precision requirements of DNNs make it extremely challenging to design efficient silicon photonics-based systems for DNN inference and training. Hyperdimensional Computing (HDC) is an emerging, brain-inspired machine learning technique that enjoys several advantages over existing DNNs, including being lightweight, requiring low-precision operands, and being robust to noise introduced by the nonidealities in the hardware. For HDC, computing in-memory (CiM) approaches have been widely used, as CiM reduces the data transfer cost if the operands can fit into the memory. However, inefficient multi-bit operations, high write latency, and low endurance make CiM ill-suited for HDC. On the other hand, the existing electro-photonic DNN accelerators are inefficient for HDC because they are specifically optimized for matrix multiplication in DNNs and consume a lot of power with high-precision data converters. In this paper, we argue that photonic computing and HDC complement each other better than photonic computing and DNNs, or CiM and HDC. We propose PhotoHDC, the first-ever electro-photonic accelerator for HDC training and inference, supporting the basic, record-based, and graph encoding schemes. Evaluating with popular datasets, we show that our accelerator can achieve two to five orders of magnitude lower EDP than the state-of-the-art electro-photonic DNN accelerators for implementing HDC training and inference. PhotoHDC also achieves four orders of magnitude lower energy-delay product than CiM-based accelerators for both HDC training and inference.
A Temporal-Difference Approach to Policy Gradient Estimation
Tosatto, Samuele, Patterson, Andrew, White, Martha, Mahmood, A. Rupam
The policy gradient theorem (Sutton et al., 2000) prescribes the usage of a cumulative discounted state distribution under the target policy to approximate the gradient. Most algorithms based on this theorem, in practice, break this assumption, introducing a distribution shift that can cause the convergence to poor solutions. In this paper, we propose a new approach of reconstructing the policy gradient from the start state without requiring a particular sampling strategy. The policy gradient calculation in this form can be simplified in terms of a gradient critic, which can be recursively estimated due to a new Bellman equation of gradients. By using temporal-difference updates of the gradient critic from an off-policy data stream, we develop the first estimator that sidesteps the distribution shift issue in a model-free way. We prove that, under certain realizability conditions, our estimator is unbiased regardless of the sampling strategy. We empirically show that our technique achieves a superior bias-variance trade-off and performance in presence of off-policy samples.
'We just want to play': Iran gamers battle reality of U.S. sanctions
Tehran – Iran's millions-strong legion of gamers revel in online worlds, but they have to fight daily real-life obstacles imposed by U.S. sanctions in their quest to level up and keep playing. "It's a problem between governments and a pain for the consumer," said 24-year-old gamer and game journalist Amir Golkhani. "We have no political demands. We just want to play," he said. Sanctions reimposed in 2018 by former U.S. president Donald Trump do not directly target the gaming industry.