@inproceedings{
sun2024neuralfuse,
title={NeuralFuse: Learning to Recover the Accuracy of Access-Limited Neural Network Inference in Low-Voltage Regimes},
author={Hao-Lun Sun and Lei Hsiung and Nandhini Chandramoorthy and Pin-Yu Chen and Tsung-Yi Ho},
booktitle={The Thirty-eighth Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems},
year={2024},
url={https://openreview.net/forum?id=npoHt6WV1F}
}
Deep neural networks (DNNs) have become ubiquitous in machine learning, but their energy consumption remains problematically high. An effective strategy for reducing such consumption is supply-voltage reduction, but if done too aggressively, it can lead to accuracy degradation. This is due to random bit-flips in static random access memory (SRAM), where model parameters are stored. To address this challenge, we have developed NeuralFuse, a novel add-on module that handles the energy-accuracy tradeoff in low-voltage regimes by learning input transformations and using them to generate error-resistant data representations, thereby protecting DNN accuracy in both nominal and low-voltage scenarios. As well as being easy to implement, NeuralFuse can be readily applied to DNNs with limited access, such cloud-based APIs that are accessed remotely or non-configurable hardware. Our experimental results demonstrate that, at a 1% bit-error rate, NeuralFuse can reduce SRAM access energy by up to 24% while recovering accuracy by up to 57%. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first approach to addressing low-voltage-induced bit errors that requires no model retraining.
NeuralFuse: Learning to Recover the Accuracy of Access-Limited Neural Network Inference in Low-Voltage Regimes
Hao-Lun Sun Lei Hsiung Nandhini Chandramoorthy Pin-Yu Chen Tsung-Yi Ho