Fully-analog in-memory computing (IMC) architectures that implement both matrix-vector multiplication and non-linear vector operations within the same memory array have shown promising performance benefits over conventional IMC systems due to the removal of energy-hungry signal conversion units. However, maintaining the computation in the analog domain for the entire deep neural network (DNN) comes with potential sensitivity to interconnect parasitics. Thus, in this paper, we investigate the effect of wire parasitic resistance and capacitance on the accuracy of DNN models deployed on fully-analog IMC architectures. Moreover, we propose a partitioning mechanism to alleviate the impact of the parasitic while keeping the computation in the analog domain through dividing large arrays into multiple partitions. The SPICE circuit simulation results for a 400 X 120 X 84 X 10 DNN model deployed on a fully-analog IMC circuit show that a 94.84% accuracy could be achieved for MNIST classification application with 16, 8, and 8 horizontal partitions, as well as 8, 8, and 1 vertical partitions for first, second, and third layers of the DNN, respectively, which is comparable to the ~97% accuracy realized by digital implementation on CPU. It is shown that accuracy benefits are achieved at the cost of higher power consumption due to the extra circuitry required for handling partitioning.
Different from handcrafted features, deep neural networks can automatically learn task-specific features from data. Due to this data-driven nature, they have achieved remarkable success in various areas. However, manual design and selection of suitable network architectures are time-consuming and require substantial effort of human experts. To address this problem, researchers have proposed neural architecture search (NAS) algorithms which can automatically generate network architectures but suffer from heavy computational cost and instability if searching from scratch. In this paper, we propose a hybrid NAS framework for ultrasound (US) image classification and segmentation. The hybrid framework consists of a pre-trained backbone and several searched cells (i.e., network building blocks), which takes advantage of the strengths of both NAS and the expert knowledge from existing convolutional neural networks. Specifically, two effective and lightweight operations, a mixed depth-wise convolution operator and a squeeze-and-excitation block, are introduced into the candidate operations to enhance the variety and capacity of the searched cells. These two operations not only decrease model parameters but also boost network performance. Moreover, we propose a re-aggregation strategy for the searched cells, aiming to further improve the performance for different vision tasks. We tested our method on two large US image datasets, including a 9-class echinococcosis dataset containing 9566 images for classification and an ovary dataset containing 3204 images for segmentation. Ablation experiments and comparison with other handcrafted or automatically searched architectures demonstrate that our method can generate more powerful and lightweight models for the above US image classification and segmentation tasks.
As mobile edge computing (MEC) finds widespread use for relieving the computational burden of compute- and interaction-intensive applications on end user devices, understanding the resulting delay and cost performance is drawing significant attention. While most existing works focus on singletask offloading in single-hop MEC networks, next generation applications (e.g., industrial automation, augmented/virtual reality) require advance models and algorithms for dynamic configuration of multi-task services over multi-hop MEC networks. In this work, we leverage recent advances in dynamic cloud network control to provide a comprehensive study of the performance of multi-hop MEC networks, addressing the key problems of multi-task offloading, timely packet scheduling, and joint computation and communication resource allocation. We present a fully distributed algorithm based on Lyapunov control theory that achieves throughput-optimal performance with delay and cost guarantees. Simulation results validate our theoretical analysis and provide insightful guidelines on the interplay between communication and computation resources in MEC networks.
We demonstrate that merely analog transmissions and match filtering can realize the function of an edge server in federated learning (FL). Therefore, a network with massively distributed user equipments (UEs) can achieve large-scale FL without an edge server. We also develop a training algorithm that allows UEs to continuously perform local computing without being interrupted by the global parameter uploading, which exploits the full potential of UEs' processing power. We derive convergence rates for the proposed schemes to quantify their training efficiency. The analyses reveal that when the interference obeys a Gaussian distribution, the proposed algorithm retrieves the convergence rate of a server-based FL. But if the interference distribution is heavy-tailed, then the heavier the tail, the slower the algorithm converges. Nonetheless, the system run time can be largely reduced by enabling computation in parallel with communication, whereas the gain is particularly pronounced when communication latency is high. These findings are corroborated via excessive simulations.
While neural architecture search (NAS) has enabled automated machine learning (AutoML) for well-researched areas, its application to tasks beyond computer vision is still under-explored. As less-studied domains are precisely those where we expect AutoML to have the greatest impact, in this work we study NAS for efficiently solving diverse problems. Seeking an approach that is fast, simple, and broadly applicable, we fix a standard convolutional network (CNN) topology and propose to search for the right kernel sizes and dilations its operations should take on. This dramatically expands the model's capacity to extract features at multiple resolutions for different types of data while only requiring search over the operation space. To overcome the efficiency challenges of naive weight-sharing in this search space, we introduce DASH, a differentiable NAS algorithm that computes the mixture-of-operations using the Fourier diagonalization of convolution, achieving both a better asymptotic complexity and an up-to-10x search time speedup in practice. We evaluate DASH on NAS-Bench-360, a suite of ten tasks designed for benchmarking NAS in diverse domains. DASH outperforms state-of-the-art methods in aggregate, attaining the best-known automated performance on seven tasks. Meanwhile, on six of the ten tasks, the combined search and retraining time is less than 2x slower than simply training a CNN backbone that is far less accurate.
Lifelong on-device learning is a key challenge for machine intelligence, and this requires learning from few, often single, samples. Memory augmented neural network has been proposed to achieve the goal, but the memory module has to be stored in an off-chip memory due to its size. Therefore the practical use has been heavily limited. Previous works on emerging memory-based implementation have difficulties in scaling up because different modules with various structures are difficult to integrate on the same chip and the small sense margin of the content addressable memory for the memory module heavily limited the degree of mismatch calculation. In this work, we implement the entire memory augmented neural network architecture in a fully integrated memristive crossbar platform and achieve an accuracy that closely matches standard software on digital hardware for the Omniglot dataset. The successful demonstration is supported by implementing new functions in crossbars in addition to widely reported matrix multiplications. For example, the locality-sensitive hashing operation is implemented in crossbar arrays by exploiting the intrinsic stochasticity of memristor devices. Besides, the content-addressable memory module is realized in crossbars, which also supports the degree of mismatches. Simulations based on experimentally validated models show such an implementation can be efficiently scaled up for one-shot learning on the Mini-ImageNet dataset. The successful demonstration paves the way for practical on-device lifelong learning and opens possibilities for novel attention-based algorithms not possible in conventional hardware.
We present a pipelined multiplier with reduced activities and minimized interconnect based on online digit-serial arithmetic. The working precision has been truncated such that $p<n$ bits are used to compute $n$ bits product, resulting in significant savings in area and power. The digit slices follow variable precision according to input, increasing upto $p$ and then decreases according to the error profile. Pipelining has been done to achieve high throughput and low latency which is desirable for compute intensive inner products. Synthesis results of the proposed designs have been presented and compared with the non-pipelined online multiplier, pipelined online multiplier with full working precision and conventional serial-parallel and array multipliers. For $8, 16, 24$ and $32$ bit precision, the proposed low power pipelined design show upto $38\%$ and $44\%$ reduction in power and area respectively compared to the pipelined online multiplier without working precision truncation.
The time and effort involved in hand-designing deep neural networks is immense. This has prompted the development of Neural Architecture Search (NAS) techniques to automate this design. However, NAS algorithms tend to be slow and expensive; they need to train vast numbers of candidate networks to inform the search process. This could be alleviated if we could partially predict a network's trained accuracy from its initial state. In this work, we examine the overlap of activations between datapoints in untrained networks and motivate how this can give a measure which is usefully indicative of a network's trained performance. We incorporate this measure into a simple algorithm that allows us to search for powerful networks without any training in a matter of seconds on a single GPU, and verify its effectiveness on NAS-Bench-101, NAS-Bench-201, NATS-Bench, and Network Design Spaces. Our approach can be readily combined with more expensive search methods; we examine a simple adaptation of regularised evolutionary search. Code for reproducing our experiments is available at //github.com/BayesWatch/nas-without-training.
Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) are information processing architectures for signals supported on graphs. They are presented here as generalizations of convolutional neural networks (CNNs) in which individual layers contain banks of graph convolutional filters instead of banks of classical convolutional filters. Otherwise, GNNs operate as CNNs. Filters are composed with pointwise nonlinearities and stacked in layers. It is shown that GNN architectures exhibit equivariance to permutation and stability to graph deformations. These properties provide a measure of explanation respecting the good performance of GNNs that can be observed empirically. It is also shown that if graphs converge to a limit object, a graphon, GNNs converge to a corresponding limit object, a graphon neural network. This convergence justifies the transferability of GNNs across networks with different number of nodes.
Deep neural network architectures have traditionally been designed and explored with human expertise in a long-lasting trial-and-error process. This process requires huge amount of time, expertise, and resources. To address this tedious problem, we propose a novel algorithm to optimally find hyperparameters of a deep network architecture automatically. We specifically focus on designing neural architectures for medical image segmentation task. Our proposed method is based on a policy gradient reinforcement learning for which the reward function is assigned a segmentation evaluation utility (i.e., dice index). We show the efficacy of the proposed method with its low computational cost in comparison with the state-of-the-art medical image segmentation networks. We also present a new architecture design, a densely connected encoder-decoder CNN, as a strong baseline architecture to apply the proposed hyperparameter search algorithm. We apply the proposed algorithm to each layer of the baseline architectures. As an application, we train the proposed system on cine cardiac MR images from Automated Cardiac Diagnosis Challenge (ACDC) MICCAI 2017. Starting from a baseline segmentation architecture, the resulting network architecture obtains the state-of-the-art results in accuracy without performing any trial-and-error based architecture design approaches or close supervision of the hyperparameters changes.
In this paper, we focus on three problems in deep learning based medical image segmentation. Firstly, U-net, as a popular model for medical image segmentation, is difficult to train when convolutional layers increase even though a deeper network usually has a better generalization ability because of more learnable parameters. Secondly, the exponential ReLU (ELU), as an alternative of ReLU, is not much different from ReLU when the network of interest gets deep. Thirdly, the Dice loss, as one of the pervasive loss functions for medical image segmentation, is not effective when the prediction is close to ground truth and will cause oscillation during training. To address the aforementioned three problems, we propose and validate a deeper network that can fit medical image datasets that are usually small in the sample size. Meanwhile, we propose a new loss function to accelerate the learning process and a combination of different activation functions to improve the network performance. Our experimental results suggest that our network is comparable or superior to state-of-the-art methods.