Addressing Irregularity in Sparse Neural Networks through a Cooperative Software/Hardware Approach

Neural networks have become the dominant algorithms rapidly as they achieve state-of-the-art performance in a broad range of applications such as image recognition, speech recognition, and natural language processing. However, neural networks keep moving toward deeper and larger architectures, posing a great challenge to hardware systems due to the huge amount of data and computations. Although sparsity has emerged as an effective solution for reducing the intensity of computation and memory accesses directly, irregularity caused by sparsity (including sparse synapses and neurons) prevents accelerators from completely leveraging the benefits, i.e., it also introduces costly indexing module in accelerators. In this article, we propose a cooperative software/hardware approach to address the irregularity of sparse neural networks efficiently. Initially, we observe the local convergence, namely larger weights tend to gather into small clusters during training. Based on that key observation, we propose a software-based coarse-grained pruning technique to reduce the irregularity of sparse synapses drastically. The coarse-grained pruning technique, together with local quantization, significantly reduces the size of indexes and improves the network compression ratio. We further design a multi-core hardware accelerator, Cambricon-SE, to address the remaining irregularity of sparse synapses and neurons efficiently. The novel accelerator have three key features: 1) selector modules to filter unnecessary synapses and neurons, 2) compress/decompress modules for exploiting the sparsity in data transmission (which is rarely studied in previous work), and 3) a multi-core architecture with elevated throughput to meet the real-time processing requirement. Compared against a state-of-the-art sparse neural network accelerator, our accelerator is $1.20 \times$ 1 . 20 × and $2.72 \times$ 2 . 72 × better in terms of performance and energy efficiency, respectively. Moreover, for real-time video analysis tasks, Cambricon-SE can process 1080p video at the speed of 76.59 fps.