PolyLUT: Learning Piecewise Polynomials for Ultra-Low Latency FPGA LUT-based Inference

Fuente: arXiv
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Autores principales: Andronic, Marta, Constantinides, George A.
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2023
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author Andronic, Marta
Constantinides, George A.
author_facet Andronic, Marta
Constantinides, George A.
contents Field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) are widely used to implement deep learning inference. Standard deep neural network inference involves the computation of interleaved linear maps and nonlinear activation functions. Prior work for ultra-low latency implementations has hardcoded the combination of linear maps and nonlinear activations inside FPGA lookup tables (LUTs). Our work is motivated by the idea that the LUTs in an FPGA can be used to implement a much greater variety of functions than this. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to training neural networks for FPGA deployment using multivariate polynomials as the basic building block. Our method takes advantage of the flexibility offered by the soft logic, hiding the polynomial evaluation inside the LUTs with minimal overhead. We show that by using polynomial building blocks, we can achieve the same accuracy using considerably fewer layers of soft logic than by using linear functions, leading to significant latency and area improvements. We demonstrate the effectiveness of this approach in three tasks: network intrusion detection, jet identification at the CERN Large Hadron Collider, and handwritten digit recognition using the MNIST dataset.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2309_02334
institution arXiv
publishDate 2023
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle PolyLUT: Learning Piecewise Polynomials for Ultra-Low Latency FPGA LUT-based Inference
Andronic, Marta
Constantinides, George A.
Machine Learning
Hardware Architecture
Field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) are widely used to implement deep learning inference. Standard deep neural network inference involves the computation of interleaved linear maps and nonlinear activation functions. Prior work for ultra-low latency implementations has hardcoded the combination of linear maps and nonlinear activations inside FPGA lookup tables (LUTs). Our work is motivated by the idea that the LUTs in an FPGA can be used to implement a much greater variety of functions than this. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to training neural networks for FPGA deployment using multivariate polynomials as the basic building block. Our method takes advantage of the flexibility offered by the soft logic, hiding the polynomial evaluation inside the LUTs with minimal overhead. We show that by using polynomial building blocks, we can achieve the same accuracy using considerably fewer layers of soft logic than by using linear functions, leading to significant latency and area improvements. We demonstrate the effectiveness of this approach in three tasks: network intrusion detection, jet identification at the CERN Large Hadron Collider, and handwritten digit recognition using the MNIST dataset.
title PolyLUT: Learning Piecewise Polynomials for Ultra-Low Latency FPGA LUT-based Inference
topic Machine Learning
Hardware Architecture
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2309.02334