Implementation of Neuromorphic Systems using post Complementary Met al-Oxide-Semiconductor (CMOS) technology based Memristive Crossbar Array (MCA) has emerged as a promising solution to enable low-power acceleration of neural networks. However, the recent trend to design Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) for achieving human-like cognitive abilities poses significant challenges towards the scalable design of neuromorphic systems (due to the increase in computation storage demands). Network pruning [7] is a powerful technique to remove redundant connections for designing optimally connected (maximally sparse) DNNs. However, such pruning techniques induce irregular connections that are incoherent to the crossbar structure. Eventually they produce DNNs with highly inefficient hardware realizations (in terms of area and energy). In this work, we propose TraNNsformer - an integrated training framework that transforms DNNs to enable their efficient realization on MCA-based systems. TraNNsformer first prunes the connectivity matrix while forming clusters with the remaining connections. Subsequently, it retrains the network to fine tune the connections and reinforce the clusters. This is done iteratively to transform the original connectivity into an optimally pruned and maximally clustered mapping. We evaluated the proposed framework by transforming different Multi-Layer Perceptron (MLP) based Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) on a wide range of datasets (MNIST, SVHN and CIFAR10) and executing them on MCA-based systems to analyze the area and energy benefits. Without accuracy loss, TraNNsformer reduces the area (energy) consumption by 28 - 55 (49 - 67 ) with respect to the original network. Compared to network pruning, TraNNsformer achieves 28 - 49 (15 - 29 ) area (energy) savings. Furthermore, TraNNsformer is a technology-aware framework that allows mapping a given DNN to any MCA size permissible by the memristive technology for reliable operations.
Prior work on learning structured connectivity in DNNs during the training process has focused on transformations for CMOS based architectures (Graphics Processing Unit) @cite_2 @cite_17 . While, post-CMOS based MCA architectures were explored in @cite_20 , they focused on clustering the synapses after the training process finishes. Our work distinguishes from the prior works as it proposes an integrated training framework to maximize the benefits from post-CMOS MCA based systems by designing DNN transformations, which conform to MCA's structural rigidity. Additionally, we also show that offline clustering (clustering after training) is unable to preserve the benefits of sparsity at the hardware level.
@cite_17 @cite_20 @cite_2
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Implementation of Neuromorphic Systems using post Complementary Met al-Oxide-Semiconductor (CMOS) technology based Memristive Crossbar Array (MCA) has emerged as a promising solution to enable low-power acceleration of neural networks. However, the recent trend to design Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) for achieving human-like cognitive abilities poses significant challenges towards the scalable design of neuromorphic systems (due to the increase in computation storage demands). Network pruning [7] is a powerful technique to remove redundant connections for designing optimally connected (maximally sparse) DNNs. However, such pruning techniques induce irregular connections that are incoherent to the crossbar structure. Eventually they produce DNNs with highly inefficient hardware realizations (in terms of area and energy). In this work, we propose TraNNsformer - an integrated training framework that transforms DNNs to enable their efficient realization on MCA-based systems. TraNNsformer first prunes the connectivity matrix while forming clusters with the remaining connections. Subsequently, it retrains the network to fine tune the connections and reinforce the clusters. This is done iteratively to transform the original connectivity into an optimally pruned and maximally clustered mapping. We evaluated the proposed framework by transforming different Multi-Layer Perceptron (MLP) based Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) on a wide range of datasets (MNIST, SVHN and CIFAR10) and executing them on MCA-based systems to analyze the area and energy benefits. Without accuracy loss, TraNNsformer reduces the area (energy) consumption by 28 - 55 (49 - 67 ) with respect to the original network. Compared to network pruning, TraNNsformer achieves 28 - 49 (15 - 29 ) area (energy) savings. Furthermore, TraNNsformer is a technology-aware framework that allows mapping a given DNN to any MCA size permissible by the memristive technology for reliable operations. The availability of large-scale annotated data and the uneven separability of different data categories have become two major impediments of deep learning for image classification. In this paper, we present a semi-supervised hierarchical convolutional neural network (SS-HCNN) to address these two challenges. A large-scale unsupervised maximum margin clustering technique is designed, which splits images into a number of hierarchical clusters iteratively to learn cluster-level CNNs at parent nodes and category-level CNNs at leaf nodes. The splitting uses the similarity of CNN features to group visually similar images into the same cluster, which relieves the uneven data separability constraint. With the hierarchical cluster-level CNNs capturing certain high-level image category information, the category-level CNNs can be trained with a small amount of labeled images, and this relieves the data annotation constraint. A novel cluster splitting criterion is also designed, which automatically terminates the image clustering in the tree hierarchy. The proposed SS-HCNN has been evaluated on the CIFAR-100 and ImageNet classification datasets. The experiments show that the SS-HCNN trained using a portion of labeled training images can achieve comparable performance with other fully trained CNNs using all labeled images. Additionally, the SS-HCNN trained using all labeled images clearly outperforms other fully trained CNNs. A deep neural network (DNN)-based new pan-sharpening method for the remote sensing image fusion problem is proposed in this letter. Research on representation learning suggests that the DNN can effectively model complex relationships between variables via the composition of several levels of nonlinearity. Inspired by this observation, a modified sparse denoising autoencoder (MSDA) algorithm is proposed to train the relationship between high-resolution (HR) and low-resolution (LR) image patches, which can be represented by the DNN. The HR LR image patches only sample from the HR LR panchromatic (PAN) images at hand, respectively, without requiring other training images. By connecting a series of MSDAs, we obtain a stacked MSDA (S-MSDA), which can effectively pretrain the DNN. Moreover, in order to better train the DNN, the entire DNN is again trained by a back-propagation algorithm after pretraining. Finally, assuming that the relationship between HR LR multispectral (MS) image patches is the same as that between HR LR PAN image patches, the HR MS image will be reconstructed from the observed LR MS image using the trained DNN. Comparative experimental results with several quality assessment indexes show that the proposed method outperforms other pan-sharpening methods in terms of visual perception and numerical measures. Benefitting from large-scale training datasets and the complex training network, Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) are widely applied in various fields with high accuracy. However, the training process of CNNs is very time-consuming, where large amounts of training samples and iterative operations are required to obtain high-quality weight parameters. In this paper, we focus on the time-consuming training process of large-scale CNNs and propose a Bi-layered Parallel Training (BPT-CNN) architecture in distributed computing environments. BPT-CNN consists of two main components: (a) an outer-layer parallel training for multiple CNN subnetworks on separate data subsets, and (b) an inner-layer parallel training for each subnetwork. In the outer-layer parallelism, we address critical issues of distributed and parallel computing, including data communication, synchronization, and workload balance. A heterogeneous-aware Incremental Data Partitioning and Allocation (IDPA) strategy is proposed, where large-scale training datasets are partitioned and allocated to the computing nodes in batches according to their computing power. To minimize the synchronization waiting during the global weight update process, an Asynchronous Global Weight Update (AGWU) strategy is proposed. In the inner-layer parallelism, we further accelerate the training process for each CNN subnetwork on each computer, where computation steps of convolutional layer and the local weight training are parallelized based on task-parallelism. We introduce task decomposition and scheduling strategies with the objectives of thread-level load balancing and minimum waiting time for critical paths. Extensive experimental results indicate that the proposed BPT-CNN effectively improves the training performance of CNNs while maintaining the accuracy.