pruning scheme
Scalable Interconnect Learning in Boolean Networks
Kresse, Fabian, Yu, Emily, Lampert, Christoph H.
Learned Differentiable Boolean Logic Networks (DBNs) already deliver efficient inference on resource-constrained hardware. We extend them with a trainable, differentiable interconnect whose parameter count remains constant as input width grows, allowing DBNs to scale to far wider layers than earlier learnable-interconnect designs while preserving their advantageous accuracy. To further reduce model size, we propose two complementary pruning stages: an SAT-based logic equivalence pass that removes redundant gates without affecting performance, and a similarity-based, data-driven pass that outperforms a magnitude-style greedy baseline and offers a superior compression-accuracy trade-off.
Neural Signal Compression using RAMAN tinyML Accelerator for BCI Applications
Krishna, Adithya, Debnath, Sohan, Srivatsav, Madhuvanthi, van Schaik, Andrรฉ, Mehendale, Mahesh, Thakur, Chetan Singh
--High-quality, multi-channel neural recording is indispensable for neuroscience research and clinical applications. Large-scale brain recordings often produce vast amounts of data that must be wirelessly transmitted for subsequent offline analysis and decoding, especially in brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) utilizing high-density intracortical recordings with hundreds or thousands of electrodes. However, transmitting raw neural data presents significant challenges due to limited communication bandwidth and resultant excessive heating. T o address this challenge, we propose a neural signal compression scheme utilizing Convolutional Autoencoders (CAEs), which achieves a compression ratio of up to 150 for compressing local field potentials (LFPs). The CAE encoder section is implemented on RAMAN, an energy-efficient tinyML accelerator designed for edge computing. Additionally, we employ hardware-software co-optimization by pruning the CAE encoder model parameters using a hardware-aware balanced stochastic pruning strategy, resolving workload imbalance issues and eliminating indexing overhead to reduce parameter storage requirements by up to 32.4%. Post layout simulation shows that the RAMAN encoder can be implemented in a TSMC 65-nm CMOS process, occupying a core area of 0.0187 mm Operating at a clock frequency of 2 MHz and a supply voltage of 1.2 V, the estimated power consumption is 15.1 ยต W per channel for the proposed DS-CAE1 model. The compressed neural data from RAMAN is reconstructed offline with signal-to-noise and distortion ratios (SNDR) of 22.6 dB and 27.4 dB, along with R2 scores of 0.81 and 0.94, respectively, evaluated on two monkey neural recordings. A. Krishna is with the Department of Electronic Systems Engineering, Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore - 560012, India, and also with the International Centre for Neuromorphic Systems, The MARCS Institute, Western Sydney University, Australia. S. Debnath, M. Srivatsav, M. Mehendale, and C. S. Thakur (Email: csthakur@iisc.ac.in) are with the Department of Electronic Systems Engineering, Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore - 560012, India. A. van Schaik is with the International Centre for Neuromorphic Systems, The MARCS Institute, Western Sydney University, Australia. This work was supported by the Pratiksha Trust grant BCD - FG/SMCH-22-2106 and INAE grant INAE/121/AKF/48 (SAP code - SP/INAE-23-0001). BCIs have emerged as a revolutionary tool for advancing our understanding of the brain and are increasingly being utilized across various clinical applications [5]-[7], providing inventive solutions for communication [8], control [1], [9], and rehabilitation [10]-[13]. Ongoing improvements in signal processing, machine learning algorithms, and neurotechnology pave the way for BCIs to revolutionize healthcare, human-computer interaction, and beyond.
Optimization of DNN-based HSI Segmentation FPGA-based SoC for ADS: A Practical Approach
Gutiรฉrrez-Zaballa, Jon, Basterretxea, Koldo, Echanobe, Javier
The use of HSI for autonomous navigation is a promising research field aimed at improving the accuracy and robustness of detection, tracking, and scene understanding systems based on vision sensors. Combining advanced computer algorithms, such as DNNs, with small-size snapshot HSI cameras enhances the reliability of these systems. HSI overcomes intrinsic limitations of greyscale and RGB imaging in depicting physical properties of targets, particularly regarding spectral reflectance and metamerism. Despite promising results in HSI-based vision developments, safety-critical systems like ADS demand strict constraints on latency, resource consumption, and security, motivating the shift of ML workloads to edge platforms. This involves a thorough software/hardware co-design scheme to distribute and optimize the tasks efficiently among the limited resources of computing platforms. With respect to inference, the over-parameterized nature of DNNs poses significant computational challenges for real-time on-the-edge deployment. In addition, the intensive data preprocessing required by HSI, which is frequently overlooked, must be carefully managed in terms of memory arrangement and inter-task communication to enable an efficient integrated pipeline design on a SoC. This work presents a set of optimization techniques for the practical co-design of a DNN-based HSI segmentation processor deployed on a FPGA-based SoC targeted at ADS, including key optimizations such as functional software/hardware task distribution, hardware-aware preprocessing, ML model compression, and a complete pipelined deployment. Applied compression techniques significantly reduce the complexity of the designed DNN to 24.34% of the original operations and to 1.02% of the original number of parameters, achieving a 2.86x speed-up in the inference task without noticeable degradation of the segmentation accuracy.
PASER: Post-Training Data Selection for Efficient Pruned Large Language Model Recovery
He, Bowei, Yin, Lihao, Zhen, Hui-Ling, Zhang, Xiaokun, Yuan, Mingxuan, Ma, Chen
Model pruning is an effective approach for compressing large language models. However, this process often leads to significant degradation of model capabilities. While post-training techniques such as instruction tuning are commonly employed to recover model performance, existing methods often overlook the uneven deterioration of model capabilities and incur high computational costs. Moreover, some instruction data irrelevant to model capability recovery may introduce negative effects. To address these challenges, we propose the \textbf{P}ost-training d\textbf{A}ta \textbf{S}election method for \textbf{E}fficient pruned large language model \textbf{R}ecovery (\textbf{PASER}). PASER aims to identify instructions where model capabilities are most severely compromised within a certain recovery data budget. Our approach first applies manifold learning and spectral clustering to group recovery data in the semantic space, revealing capability-specific instruction sets. We then adaptively allocate the data budget to different clusters based on the degrees of model capability degradation. In each cluster, we prioritize data samples where model performance has declined dramatically. To mitigate potential negative transfer, we also detect and filter out conflicting or irrelevant recovery data. Extensive experiments demonstrate that PASER significantly outperforms conventional baselines, effectively recovering the general capabilities of pruned LLMs while utilizing merely 4\%-20\% of the original post-training data.
A Multi-objective Complex Network Pruning Framework Based on Divide-and-conquer and Global Performance Impairment Ranking
Shang, Ronghua, Zhu, Songling, Wu, Yinan, Zhang, Weitong, Jiao, Licheng, Xu, Songhua
Model compression plays a vital role in the practical deployment of deep neural networks (DNNs), and evolutionary multi-objective (EMO) pruning is an essential tool in balancing the compression rate and performance of the DNNs. However, due to its population-based nature, EMO pruning suffers from the complex optimization space and the resource-intensive structure verification process, especially in complex networks. To this end, a multi-objective complex network pruning framework based on divide-and-conquer and global performance impairment ranking (EMO-DIR) is proposed in this paper. Firstly, a divide-and-conquer EMO network pruning method is proposed, which decomposes the complex task of EMO pruning on the entire network into easier sub-tasks on multiple sub-networks. On the one hand, this decomposition narrows the pruning optimization space and decreases the optimization difficulty; on the other hand, the smaller network structure converges faster, so the proposed algorithm consumes lower computational resources. Secondly, a sub-network training method based on cross-network constraints is designed, which could bridge independent EMO pruning sub-tasks, allowing them to collaborate better and improving the overall performance of the pruned network. Finally, a multiple sub-networks joint pruning method based on EMO is proposed. This method combines the Pareto Fronts from EMO pruning results on multiple sub-networks through global performance impairment ranking to design a joint pruning scheme. The rich experiments on CIFAR-10/100 and ImageNet-100/1k are conducted. The proposed algorithm achieves a comparable performance with the state-of-the-art pruning methods.
A Unifying Tensor View for Lightweight CNNs
Li, Jason Chun Lok, Lin, Rui, Zhou, Jiajun, Lam, Edmund Yin Mun, Wong, Ngai
Despite the decomposition of convolutional kernels for lightweight CNNs being well studied, existing works that rely on tensor network diagrams or hyperdimensional abstraction lack geometry intuition. This work devises a new perspective by linking a 3D-reshaped kernel tensor to its various slice-wise and rank-1 decompositions, permitting a straightforward connection between various tensor approximations and efficient CNN modules. Specifically, it is discovered that a pointwise-depthwise-pointwise (PDP) configuration constitutes a viable construct for lightweight CNNs. Moreover, a novel link to the latest ShiftNet is established, inspiring a first-ever shift layer pruning that achieves nearly 50% compression with < 1% drop in accuracy for ShiftResNet.
Learning a Consensus Sub-Network with Polarization Regularization and One Pass Training
Zhi, Xiaoying, Babbar, Varun, Sun, Pheobe, Silavong, Fran, Shi, Ruibo, Moran, Sean
The subject of green AI has been gaining attention within the deep learning community given the recent trend of ever larger and more complex neural network models. Existing solutions for reducing the computational load of training at inference time usually involve pruning the network parameters. Pruning schemes often create extra overhead either by iterative training and fine-tuning for static pruning or repeated computation of a dynamic pruning graph. We propose a new parameter pruning strategy for learning a lighter-weight sub-network that minimizes the energy cost while maintaining comparable performance to the fully parameterised network on given downstream tasks. Our proposed pruning scheme is green-oriented, as it only requires a one-off training to discover the optimal static sub-networks by dynamic pruning methods. The pruning scheme consists of a binary gating module and a novel loss function to uncover sub-networks with user-defined sparsity. Our method enables pruning and training simultaneously, which saves energy in both the training and inference phases and avoids extra computational overhead from gating modules at inference time. Our results on CIFAR-10 and CIFAR-100 suggest that our scheme can remove 50% of connections in deep networks with less than 1% reduction in classification accuracy. Compared to other related pruning methods, our method demonstrates a lower drop in accuracy for equivalent reductions in computational cost.
Machine Learning-Aided Efficient Decoding of Reed-Muller Subcodes
Jamali, Mohammad Vahid, Liu, Xiyang, Makkuva, Ashok Vardhan, Mahdavifar, Hessam, Oh, Sewoong, Viswanath, Pramod
Reed-Muller (RM) codes achieve the capacity of general binary-input memoryless symmetric channels and are conjectured to have a comparable performance to that of random codes in terms of scaling laws. However, such results are established assuming maximum-likelihood decoders for general code parameters. Also, RM codes only admit limited sets of rates. Efficient decoders such as successive cancellation list (SCL) decoder and recently-introduced recursive projection-aggregation (RPA) decoders are available for RM codes at finite lengths. In this paper, we focus on subcodes of RM codes with flexible rates. We first extend the RPA decoding algorithm to RM subcodes. To lower the complexity of our decoding algorithm, referred to as subRPA, we investigate different approaches to prune the projections. Next, we derive the soft-decision based version of our algorithm, called soft-subRPA, that not only improves upon the performance of subRPA but also enables a differentiable decoding algorithm. Building upon the soft-subRPA algorithm, we then provide a framework for training a machine learning (ML) model to search for \textit{good} sets of projections that minimize the decoding error rate. Training our ML model enables achieving very close to the performance of full-projection decoding with a significantly smaller number of projections. We also show that the choice of the projections in decoding RM subcodes matters significantly, and our ML-aided projection pruning scheme is able to find a \textit{good} selection, i.e., with negligible performance degradation compared to the full-projection case, given a reasonable number of projections.
Efficient Federated Learning with Enhanced Privacy via Lottery Ticket Pruning in Edge Computing
Shi, Yifan, Wei, Kang, Shen, Li, Li, Jun, Wang, Xueqian, Yuan, Bo, Guo, Song
Federated learning (FL) is a collaborative learning paradigm for decentralized private data from mobile terminals (MTs). However, it suffers from issues in terms of communication, resource of MTs, and privacy. Existing privacy-preserving FL methods usually adopt the instance-level differential privacy (DP), which provides a rigorous privacy guarantee but with several bottlenecks: severe performance degradation, transmission overhead, and resource constraints of edge devices such as MTs. To overcome these drawbacks, we propose Fed-LTP, an efficient and privacy-enhanced FL framework with \underline{\textbf{L}}ottery \underline{\textbf{T}}icket \underline{\textbf{H}}ypothesis (LTH) and zero-concentrated D\underline{\textbf{P}} (zCDP). It generates a pruned global model on the server side and conducts sparse-to-sparse training from scratch with zCDP on the client side. On the server side, two pruning schemes are proposed: (i) the weight-based pruning (LTH) determines the pruned global model structure; (ii) the iterative pruning further shrinks the size of the pruned model's parameters. Meanwhile, the performance of Fed-LTP is also boosted via model validation based on the Laplace mechanism. On the client side, we use sparse-to-sparse training to solve the resource-constraints issue and provide tighter privacy analysis to reduce the privacy budget. We evaluate the effectiveness of Fed-LTP on several real-world datasets in both independent and identically distributed (IID) and non-IID settings. The results clearly confirm the superiority of Fed-LTP over state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods in communication, computation, and memory efficiencies while realizing a better utility-privacy trade-off.
Achieving on-Mobile Real-Time Super-Resolution with Neural Architecture and Pruning Search
Zhan, Zheng, Gong, Yifan, Zhao, Pu, Yuan, Geng, Niu, Wei, Wu, Yushu, Zhang, Tianyun, Jayaweera, Malith, Kaeli, David, Ren, Bin, Lin, Xue, Wang, Yanzhi
Though recent years have witnessed remarkable progress in single image super-resolution (SISR) tasks with the prosperous development of deep neural networks (DNNs), the deep learning methods are confronted with the computation and memory consumption issues in practice, especially for resource-limited platforms such as mobile devices. To overcome the challenge and facilitate the real-time deployment of SISR tasks on mobile, we combine neural architecture search with pruning search and propose an automatic search framework that derives sparse super-resolution (SR) models with high image quality while satisfying the real-time inference requirement. To decrease the search cost, we leverage the weight sharing strategy by introducing a supernet and decouple the search problem into three stages, including supernet construction, compiler-aware architecture and pruning search, and compiler-aware pruning ratio search. With the proposed framework, we are the first to achieve real-time SR inference (with only tens of milliseconds per frame) for implementing 720p resolution with competitive image quality (in terms of PSNR and SSIM) on mobile platforms (Samsung Galaxy S20).