Stochastic Spiking Attention: Accelerating Attention with Stochastic Computing in Spiking Networks

Fuente: arXiv
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Autores principales: Song, Zihang, Katti, Prabodh, Simeone, Osvaldo, Rajendran, Bipin
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2024
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author Song, Zihang
Katti, Prabodh
Simeone, Osvaldo
Rajendran, Bipin
author_facet Song, Zihang
Katti, Prabodh
Simeone, Osvaldo
Rajendran, Bipin
contents Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) have been recently integrated into Transformer architectures due to their potential to reduce computational demands and to improve power efficiency. Yet, the implementation of the attention mechanism using spiking signals on general-purpose computing platforms remains inefficient. In this paper, we propose a novel framework leveraging stochastic computing (SC) to effectively execute the dot-product attention for SNN-based Transformers. We demonstrate that our approach can achieve high classification accuracy ($83.53\%$) on CIFAR-10 within 10 time steps, which is comparable to the performance of a baseline artificial neural network implementation ($83.66\%$). We estimate that the proposed SC approach can lead to over $6.3\times$ reduction in computing energy and $1.7\times$ reduction in memory access costs for a digital CMOS-based ASIC design. We experimentally validate our stochastic attention block design through an FPGA implementation, which is shown to achieve $48\times$ lower latency as compared to a GPU implementation, while consuming $15\times$ less power.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2402_09109
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Stochastic Spiking Attention: Accelerating Attention with Stochastic Computing in Spiking Networks
Song, Zihang
Katti, Prabodh
Simeone, Osvaldo
Rajendran, Bipin
Hardware Architecture
Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
Neural and Evolutionary Computing
Signal Processing
Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) have been recently integrated into Transformer architectures due to their potential to reduce computational demands and to improve power efficiency. Yet, the implementation of the attention mechanism using spiking signals on general-purpose computing platforms remains inefficient. In this paper, we propose a novel framework leveraging stochastic computing (SC) to effectively execute the dot-product attention for SNN-based Transformers. We demonstrate that our approach can achieve high classification accuracy ($83.53\%$) on CIFAR-10 within 10 time steps, which is comparable to the performance of a baseline artificial neural network implementation ($83.66\%$). We estimate that the proposed SC approach can lead to over $6.3\times$ reduction in computing energy and $1.7\times$ reduction in memory access costs for a digital CMOS-based ASIC design. We experimentally validate our stochastic attention block design through an FPGA implementation, which is shown to achieve $48\times$ lower latency as compared to a GPU implementation, while consuming $15\times$ less power.
title Stochastic Spiking Attention: Accelerating Attention with Stochastic Computing in Spiking Networks
topic Hardware Architecture
Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
Neural and Evolutionary Computing
Signal Processing
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.09109