Activity Sparsity Complements Weight Sparsity for Efficient RNN Inference

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Mukherji, Rishav, Schöne, Mark, Nazeer, Khaleelulla Khan, Mayr, Christian, Subramoney, Anand
Format: Preprint
Published: 2023
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author Mukherji, Rishav
Schöne, Mark
Nazeer, Khaleelulla Khan
Mayr, Christian
Subramoney, Anand
author_facet Mukherji, Rishav
Schöne, Mark
Nazeer, Khaleelulla Khan
Mayr, Christian
Subramoney, Anand
contents Artificial neural networks open up unprecedented machine learning capabilities at the cost of ever growing computational requirements. Sparsifying the parameters, often achieved through weight pruning, has been identified as a powerful technique to compress the number of model parameters and reduce the computational operations of neural networks. Yet, sparse activations, while omnipresent in both biological neural networks and deep learning systems, have not been fully utilized as a compression technique in deep learning. Moreover, the interaction between sparse activations and weight pruning is not fully understood. In this work, we demonstrate that activity sparsity can compose multiplicatively with parameter sparsity in a recurrent neural network model based on the GRU that is designed to be activity sparse. We achieve up to $20\times$ reduction of computation while maintaining perplexities below $60$ on the Penn Treebank language modeling task. This magnitude of reduction has not been achieved previously with solely sparsely connected LSTMs, and the language modeling performance of our model has not been achieved previously with any sparsely activated recurrent neural networks or spiking neural networks. Neuromorphic computing devices are especially good at taking advantage of the dynamic activity sparsity, and our results provide strong evidence that making deep learning models activity sparse and porting them to neuromorphic devices can be a viable strategy that does not compromise on task performance. Our results also drive further convergence of methods from deep learning and neuromorphic computing for efficient machine learning.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2311_07625
institution arXiv
publishDate 2023
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Activity Sparsity Complements Weight Sparsity for Efficient RNN Inference
Mukherji, Rishav
Schöne, Mark
Nazeer, Khaleelulla Khan
Mayr, Christian
Subramoney, Anand
Machine Learning
Artificial neural networks open up unprecedented machine learning capabilities at the cost of ever growing computational requirements. Sparsifying the parameters, often achieved through weight pruning, has been identified as a powerful technique to compress the number of model parameters and reduce the computational operations of neural networks. Yet, sparse activations, while omnipresent in both biological neural networks and deep learning systems, have not been fully utilized as a compression technique in deep learning. Moreover, the interaction between sparse activations and weight pruning is not fully understood. In this work, we demonstrate that activity sparsity can compose multiplicatively with parameter sparsity in a recurrent neural network model based on the GRU that is designed to be activity sparse. We achieve up to $20\times$ reduction of computation while maintaining perplexities below $60$ on the Penn Treebank language modeling task. This magnitude of reduction has not been achieved previously with solely sparsely connected LSTMs, and the language modeling performance of our model has not been achieved previously with any sparsely activated recurrent neural networks or spiking neural networks. Neuromorphic computing devices are especially good at taking advantage of the dynamic activity sparsity, and our results provide strong evidence that making deep learning models activity sparse and porting them to neuromorphic devices can be a viable strategy that does not compromise on task performance. Our results also drive further convergence of methods from deep learning and neuromorphic computing for efficient machine learning.
title Activity Sparsity Complements Weight Sparsity for Efficient RNN Inference
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2311.07625