A Rank Decomposed Statistical Error Compensation Technique for Robust Convolutional Neural Networks in the Near Threshold Voltage Regime

Yingyan Lin, Sai Zhang, Naresh R. Shanbhag

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

Abstract

There has been a growing interest in implementing complex machine learning algorithms such as convolutional neural networks (CNNs) on lower power embedded platforms to enable on-device learning and inference. Many of these platforms are to be deployed as low power sensor nodes with low to medium throughput requirement. Near threshold voltage (NTV) designs are well-suited for these applications but suffer from a significant increase in variations. In this paper, we propose a variation-tolerant architecture for CNNs capable of operating in NTV regime for energy efficiency. A statistical error compensation (SEC) technique referred to as rank decomposed SEC (RD-SEC) is proposed. The key idea is to exploit inherent redundancy within matrix-vector multiplication (or dot product ensemble), a power-hungry operation in CNNs, to derive low-cost estimators for error detection and compensation. When evaluated in CNNs for both the MNIST and CIFAR-10 datasets, simulation results in 45 nm CMOS show that RD-SEC enables robust CNNs operating in the NTV regime. Specifically, the proposed architecture can achieve up to 11 × improvement in variation tolerance and enable up to 113 × reduction in the standard deviation of detection accuracy Pdet while incurring marginal degradation in the median detection accuracy.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Pages (from-to)1439-1451
Number of pages13
JournalJournal of Signal Processing Systems
Volume90
Issue number10
DOIs
StatePublished - Oct 1 2018

Keywords

  • Convolutional neural networks
  • Near threshold voltage regime
  • Rank decomposition
  • Statistical error compensation

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Control and Systems Engineering
  • Theoretical Computer Science
  • Signal Processing
  • Information Systems
  • Modeling and Simulation
  • Hardware and Architecture

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