Related papers: Efficient Softmax Approximation for Deep Neural Ne…

Transformers have transformed the field of natural language processing. This performance is largely attributed to the use of stacked self-attention layers, each of which consists of matrix multiplies as well as softmax operations. As a…

Large transformer models have achieved state-of-the-art results in numerous natural language processing tasks. Among the pivotal components of the transformer architecture, the attention mechanism plays a crucial role in capturing token…

Deep neural networks (DNNs) play an important role in machine learning due to its outstanding performance compared to other alternatives. However, DNNs are not suitable for safety-critical applications since DNNs can be easily fooled by…

On-device Deep Neural Network (DNN) inference consumes significant computing resources and development efforts. To alleviate that, we propose LUT-NN, the first system to empower inference by table lookup, to reduce inference cost. LUT-NN…

The self-attention mechanism distinguishes transformer-based large language models (LLMs) apart from convolutional and recurrent neural networks. Despite the performance improvement, achieving real-time LLM inference on silicon remains…

Nowadays, the rapid growth of Deep Neural Network (DNN) architectures has established them as the defacto approach for providing advanced Machine Learning tasks with excellent accuracy. Targeting low-power DNN computing, this paper examines…

Non-linear operations such as GELU, Layer normalization, and Softmax are essential yet costly building blocks of Transformer models. Several prior works simplified these operations with look-up tables or integer computations, but such…

The state-of-the-art approaches employ approximate computing to reduce the energy consumption of DNN hardware. Approximate DNNs then require extensive retraining afterwards to recover from the accuracy loss caused by the use of approximate…

Energy and resource efficient training of DNNs will greatly extend the applications of deep learning. However, there are three major obstacles which mandate accurate calculation in high precision. In this paper, we tackle two of them…

Transformers have become the cornerstone of modern large-scale language models, but their reliance on softmax attention poses a computational bottleneck at both training and inference. Recurrent models offer high efficiency, but compressing…

The original softmax-based attention mechanism (regular attention) in the extremely successful Transformer architecture computes attention between $N$ tokens, each embedded in a $D$-dimensional head, with a time complexity of $O(N^2D)$.…

For FPGA-based neural network accelerators, digital signal processing (DSP) blocks have traditionally been the cornerstone for handling multiplications. This paper introduces LUTMUL, which harnesses the potential of look-up tables (LUTs)…

Precision scaling has emerged as a popular technique to optimize the compute and storage requirements of Deep Neural Networks (DNNs). Efforts toward creating ultra-low-precision (sub-8-bit) DNNs suggest that the minimum precision required…

Transformers are mostly relying on softmax attention, which introduces quadratic complexity with respect to sequence length and remains a major bottleneck for efficient inference. Prior work on linear or hybrid attention typically replaces…

Recently, numerous efficient Transformers have been proposed to reduce the quadratic computational complexity of standard Transformers caused by the Softmax attention. However, most of them simply swap Softmax with an efficient attention…

Large language models (LLMs) have made transformed changes for human society. One of the key computation in LLMs is the softmax unit. This operation is important in LLMs because it allows the model to generate a distribution over possible…

To accelerate the inference of deep neural networks (DNNs), quantization with low-bitwidth numbers is actively researched. A prominent challenge is to quantize the DNN models into low-bitwidth numbers without significant accuracy…

The attention mechanism is the computational core of modern Transformer architectures, but its quadratic complexity in the input sequence length is the bottleneck for large-scale inference. This has motivated a rapidly growing body of work…

In Transformer models, non-GEMM (non-General Matrix Multiplication) operations -- especially Softmax and Layer Normalization (LayerNorm) -- often dominate hardware cost due to their nonlinear nature. To address this, previous approximation…

Qubit readout is a critical operation in quantum computing systems, which maps the analog response of qubits into discrete classical states. Deep neural networks (DNNs) have recently emerged as a promising solution to improve readout…