Related papers: Efficient Softmax Approximation for Deep Neural Ne…
Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) are computationally and memory intensive, which makes their hardware implementation a challenging task especially for resource constrained devices such as IoT nodes. To address this challenge, this paper…
Softmax is widely used in deep learning to map some representation to a probability distribution. As it is based on exp/log functions that are relatively expensive in multi-party computation, Mohassel and Zhang (2017) proposed a simpler…
Transformer-based models have emerged as one of the most widely used architectures for natural language processing, natural language generation, and image generation. The size of the state-of-the-art models has increased steadily reaching…
Computations for the softmax function are significantly expensive when the number of output classes is large. In this paper, we present a novel softmax inference speedup method, Doubly Sparse Softmax (DS-Softmax), that leverages sparse…
When training early-stage deep neural networks (DNNs), generating intermediate features via convolution or linear layers occupied most of the execution time. Accordingly, extensive research has been done to reduce the computational burden…
As the performance gains from accelerating quantized matrix multiplication plateau, the softmax operation becomes the critical bottleneck in Transformer inference. This bottleneck stems from two hardware limitations: (1) limited data…
The transformer's attention mechanism has revolutionized AI and machine learning, with its efficient computation being crucial to its performance. However, calculating attention involves matrix operations interspersed with softmax…
Extensive efforts have been made to boost the performance in the domain of language models by introducing various attention-based transformers. However, the inclusion of linear layers with large dimensions contributes to significant…
Transformer networks have emerged as the state-of-the-art approach for natural language processing tasks and are gaining popularity in other domains such as computer vision and audio processing. However, the efficient hardware acceleration…
The softmax activation function plays a crucial role in the success of large language models (LLMs), particularly in the self-attention mechanism of the widely adopted Transformer architecture. However, the underlying learning dynamics that…
Low-bit quantization of network weights and activations can drastically reduce the memory footprint, complexity, energy consumption and latency of Deep Neural Networks (DNNs). However, low-bit quantization can also cause a considerable drop…
The use of low numerical precision is a fundamental optimization included in modern accelerators for Deep Neural Networks (DNNs). The number of bits of the numerical representation is set to the minimum precision that is able to retain…
In recent years, the performance of face verification systems has significantly improved using deep convolutional neural networks (DCNNs). A typical pipeline for face verification includes training a deep network for subject classification…
Energy efficiency of hardware accelerators of deep neural networks (DNN) can be improved by introducing approximate arithmetic circuits. In order to quantify the error introduced by using these circuits and avoid the expensive hardware…
The quadratic computational complexity of softmax transformers has become a bottleneck in long-context scenarios. In contrast, linear attention model families provide a promising direction towards a more efficient sequential model. These…
The input method is an essential service on every mobile and desktop devices that provides text suggestions. It converts sequential keyboard inputs to the characters in its target language, which is indispensable for Japanese and Chinese…
FPGAs have distinct advantages as a technology for deploying deep neural networks (DNNs) at the edge. Lookup Table (LUT) based networks, where neurons are directly modeled using LUTs, help maximize this promise of offering ultra-low latency…
Specialized hardware accelerators have been designed and employed to maximize the performance efficiency of Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs). However, such accelerators are vulnerable to transient faults (i.e., soft errors), which occur due…
Traditional digital implementations of neural accelerators are limited by high power and area overheads, while analog and non-CMOS implementations suffer from noise, device mismatch, and reliability issues. This paper introduces a CMOS…
Transformers have shown remarkable performance in both natural language processing (NLP) and computer vision (CV) tasks. However, their real-time inference speed and efficiency are limited due to the inefficiency in Softmax and Layer…