LUTNet: Learning FPGA Configurations for Highly Efficient Neural Network Inference
OA Location
Author(s)
Wang, Erwei
Davis, James J
Cheung, Peter
Constantinides, George A
Type
Journal Article
Abstract
Research has shown that deep neural networks contain significant redundancy, and thus that high classification accuracy can be achieved even when weights and activations are quantized down to binary values. Network binarization on FPGAs greatly increases area efficiency by replacing resource-hungry multipliers with lightweight XNOR gates. However, an FPGA's fundamental building block, the K-LUT, is capable of implementing far more than an XNOR: it can perform any K-input Boolean operation. Inspired by this observation, we propose LUTNet, an end-to-end hardware-software framework for the construction of area-efficient FPGA-based neural network accelerators using the native LUTs as inference operators. We describe the realization of both unrolled and tiled LUTNet architectures, with the latter facilitating smaller, less power-hungry deployment over the former while sacrificing area and energy efficiency along with throughput. For both varieties, we demonstrate that the exploitation of LUT flexibility allows for far heavier pruning than possible in prior works, resulting in significant area savings while achieving comparable accuracy. Against the state-of-the-art binarized neural network implementation, we achieve up to twice the area efficiency for several standard network models when inferencing popular datasets. We also demonstrate that even greater energy efficiency improvements are obtainable.
Date Issued
2020-12-01
Date Acceptance
2020-03-01
Citation
IEEE Transactions on Computers, 2020, 69 (12), pp.1795-1808
ISSN
0018-9340
Publisher
Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers
Start Page
1795
End Page
1808
Journal / Book Title
IEEE Transactions on Computers
Volume
69
Issue
12
Copyright Statement
© 2020 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works.
Sponsor
Royal Academy Of Engineering
Imagination Technologies Ltd
Engineering & Physical Science Research Council (EPSRC)
Engineering & Physical Science Research Council (EPSRC)
Identifier
http://arxiv.org/abs/1910.12625
Grant Number
Prof Constantinides Chair
Prof Constantinides Chair
EP/P010040/1
EP/S030069/1
Subjects
Science & Technology
Technology
Computer Science, Hardware & Architecture
Engineering, Electrical & Electronic
Computer Science
Engineering
Deep neural network
hardware architecture
field-programmable gate array
lookup table
cs.LG
cs.LG
cs.CV
eess.SP
stat.ML
Computer Hardware & Architecture
0803 Computer Software
0805 Distributed Computing
1006 Computer Hardware
Publication Status
Published
Date Publish Online
2020-03-06