Title
EncoDeep: Realizing Bit-flexible Encoding for Deep Neural Networks
Abstract
AbstractThis article proposes EncoDeep, an end-to-end framework that facilitates encoding, bitwidth customization, fine-tuning, and implementation of neural networks on FPGA platforms. EncoDeep incorporates nonlinear encoding to the computation flow of neural networks to save memory. The encoded features demand significantly lower storage compared to the raw full-precision activation values; therefore, the execution flow of EncoDeep hardware engine is completely performed within the FPGA using on-chip streaming buffers with no access to the off-chip DRAM. We further propose a fully automated optimization algorithm that determines the flexible encoding bitwidths across network layers. EncoDeep full-stack framework comprises a compiler that takes a high-level Python description of an arbitrary neural network. The compiler then instantiates the corresponding elements from EncoDeep Hardware library for FPGA implementation. Our evaluations on MNIST, SVHN, and CIFAR-10 datasets demonstrate an average of 4.65× throughput improvement compared to stand-alone weight encoding. We further compare EncoDeep with six FPGA accelerators on ImageNet, showing an average of 3.6× and 2.54× improvement in throughput and performance-per-watt, respectively.
Year
DOI
Venue
2020
10.1145/3391901
ACM Transactions on Embedded Computing Systems
Keywords
DocType
Volume
Resource-customized computing, automated optimization, neural network customization
Journal
19
Issue
ISSN
Citations 
6
1539-9087
2
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.37
0
3
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Mohammad Samragh1387.01
Mojan Javaheripi2185.83
Farinaz Koushanfar33055268.84