Title
The Synthesis of XNOR Recurrent Neural Networks with Stochastic Logic
Abstract
The emergence of XNOR networks seek to reduce the model size and computational cost of neural networks for their deployment on specialized hardware requiring real-time processes with limited hardware resources. In XNOR networks, both weights and activations are binary, bringing great benefits to specialized hardware by replacing expensive multiplications with simple XNOR operations. Although XNOR convolutional and fully-connected neural networks have been successfully developed during the past few years, there is no XNOR network implementing commonly-used variants of recurrent neural networks such as long short-term memories (LSTMs). The main computational core of LSTMs involves vector-matrix multiplications followed by a set of non-linear functions and element-wise multiplications to obtain the gate activations and state vectors, respectively. Several previous attempts on quantization of LSTMs only focused on quantization of the vector-matrix multiplications in LSTMs while retaining the element-wise multiplications in full precision. In this paper, we propose a method that converts all the multiplications in LSTMs to XNOR operations using stochastic computing. To this end, we introduce a weighted finite-state machine and its synthesis method to approximate the non-linear functions used in LSTMs on stochastic bit streams. Experimental results show that the proposed XNOR LSTMs reduce the computational complexity of their quantized counterparts by a factor of 86x without any sacrifice on latency while achieving a better accuracy across various temporal tasks.
Year
Venue
Keywords
2019
ADVANCES IN NEURAL INFORMATION PROCESSING SYSTEMS 32 (NIPS 2019)
neural networks,recurrent neural network,computational complexity,stochastic computing,state machine
Field
DocType
Volume
XNOR gate,Computer science,Recurrent neural network,Stochastic logic,Artificial intelligence,Machine learning
Conference
32
ISSN
Citations 
PageRank 
1049-5258
0
0.34
References 
Authors
0
4
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Arash Ardakani1338.42
Zhengyun Ji201.01
Ardakani, Amir300.34
Warren J. Gross41106113.38