LUTNet: Rethinking Inference in FPGA Soft Logic
OA Location
Author(s)
Wang, Erwei
Davis, James
Cheung, Peter
Constantinides, George
Type
Conference Paper
Abstract
Research has shown that deep neural networks contain significant redundancy, and that high classification accuracies can be achieved even when weights and activations are quantised down to binary values. Network binarisation 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 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 binarised neural network implementation, we achieve 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
2019-06-13
Date Acceptance
2019-03-03
Citation
2019 IEEE 27th Annual International Symposium on Field-Programmable Custom Computing Machines (FCCM), 2019, pp.26-34
ISBN
978-1-7281-1131-5
ISSN
2576-2621
Publisher
IEEE
Start Page
26
End Page
34
Journal / Book Title
2019 IEEE 27th Annual International Symposium on Field-Programmable Custom Computing Machines (FCCM)
Copyright Statement
© 2019 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
Engineering & Physical Science Research Council (EPSRC)
Royal Academy Of Engineering
Imagination Technologies Ltd
Identifier
https://arxiv.org/abs/1904.00938
Grant Number
EP/P010040/1
Prof Constantinides Chair
Prof Constantinides Chair
Source
IEEE Symposium on Field-programmable Custom Computing Machines (FCCM) 2019
Subjects
Science & Technology
Technology
Computer Science, Hardware & Architecture
Computer Science, Theory & Methods
Engineering, Electrical & Electronic
Computer Science
Engineering
cs.LG
cs.LG
stat.ML
Publication Status
Published
Start Date
2019-04-28
Finish Date
2019-05-01
Coverage Spatial
San Diego, CA, USA
Date Publish Online
2019-06-13