While memory-augmented neural networks (MANNs) offer an effective solution for few-shot learning (FSL) by integrating deep neural networks with external memory, the capacity requirements and energy overhead of data movement become enormous due to the large number of support vectors in many-class FSL scenarios. Various in-memory search solutions have emerged to improve the energy efficiency of MANNs. NAND-based multi-bit content addressable memory (MCAM) is a promising option due to its high density and large capacity. Despite its potential, MCAM faces limitations such as a restricted number of word lines, limited quantization levels, and non-ideal effects like varying string currents and bottleneck effects, which lead to significant accuracy drops. To address these issues, we propose several innovative methods. First, the Multi-bit Thermometer Code (MTMC) leverages the extensive capacity of MCAM to enhance vector precision using cumulative encoding rules, thereby mitigating the bottleneck effect. Second, the Asymmetric vector similarity search (AVSS) reduces the precision of the query vector while maintaining that of the support vectors, thereby minimizing the search iterations and improving efficiency in many-class scenarios. Finally, the Hardware-Aware Training (HAT) method optimizes controller training by modeling the hardware characteristics of MCAM, thus enhancing the reliability of the system. Our integrated framework reduces search iterations by up to 32 times, and increases overall accuracy by 1.58% to 6.94%.

We propose a new method of multiway clustering for 3-order tensors via affinity matrix (MCAM). Based on a notion of similarity between the tensor slices and the spread of information of each slice, our model builds an affinity/similarity matrix on which we apply advanced clustering methods. The combination of all clusters of the three modes delivers the desired multiway clustering. Finally, MCAM achieves competitive results compared with other known algorithms on synthetics and real datasets.

In this work, a parameter-efficient attention module is presented for emotion classification using a limited, or relatively small, number of electroencephalogram (EEG) signals. This module is called the Monotonicity Constrained Attention Module (MCAM) due to its capability of incorporating priors on the monotonicity when converting features' Gram matrices into attention matrices for better feature refinement. Our experiments have shown that MCAM's effectiveness is comparable to state-of-the-art attention modules in boosting the backbone network's performance in prediction while requiring less parameters. Several accompanying sensitivity analyses on trained models' prediction concerning different attacks are also performed. These attacks include various frequency domain filtering levels and gradually morphing between samples associated with multiple labels. Our results can help better understand different modules' behaviour in prediction and can provide guidance in applications where data is limited and are with noises.