High-performance FPGA-based accelerator for Bayesian neural networks
File(s)dac21_bayescnn.pdf (493.33 KB)
Conference Paper
Author(s)
Type
Conference Paper
Abstract
Neural networks (NNs) have demonstrated their potential in a wide range of applications such as image recognition, decision making or recommendation systems. However, standard NNs are unable to capture their model uncertainty which is crucial for many safety-critical applications including healthcare and autonomous vehicles. In comparison, Bayesian neural networks (BNNs) are able to express uncertainty in their prediction via a mathematical grounding. Nevertheless, BNNs have not been as widely used in industrial practice, mainly because of their expensive computational cost and limited hardware performance. This work proposes a novel FPGA based hardware architecture to accelerate BNNs inferred through Monte Carlo Dropout. Compared with other state-of-the-art BNN accelerators, the proposed accelerator can achieve up to 4 times higher energy efficiency and 9 times better compute efficiency. Considering partial Bayesian inference, an automatic framework is proposed, which explores the trade-off between hardware and algorithmic performance. Extensive experiments are conducted to demonstrate that our proposed framework can effectively find the optimal points in the design space.
Date Acceptance
2022-02-19
Citation
2021 58th ACM/IEEE Design Automation Conference (DAC)
Publisher
IEEE
Journal / Book Title
2021 58th ACM/IEEE Design Automation Conference (DAC)
Copyright Statement
©2022 The Author(s)
Sponsor
Engineering & Physical Science Research Council (EPSRC)
Engineering & Physical Science Research Council (EPSRC)
Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council
Identifier
https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9586137
Grant Number
EP/S030069/1
EP/P010040/1
EP/L016796/1
Source
2021 58th ACM/IEEE Design Automation Conference (DAC)
Publication Status
Published
Start Date
2021-12-05
Coverage Spatial
San Fransisco, CA, US