Chameleon: A MatMul-Free Temporal Convolutional Network Accelerator for End-to-End Few-Shot and Continual Learning from Sequential Data

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Auteurs principaux: Blanken, Douwe den, Frenkel, Charlotte
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2025
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author Blanken, Douwe den
Frenkel, Charlotte
author_facet Blanken, Douwe den
Frenkel, Charlotte
contents On-device learning at the edge enables low-latency, private personalization with improved long-term robustness and reduced maintenance costs. Yet, achieving scalable, low-power end-to-end on-chip learning, especially from real-world sequential data with a limited number of examples, is an open challenge. Indeed, accelerators supporting error backpropagation optimize for learning performance at the expense of inference efficiency, while simplified learning algorithms often fail to reach acceptable accuracy targets. In this work, we present Chameleon, leveraging three key contributions to solve these challenges. (i) A unified learning and inference architecture supports few-shot learning (FSL), continual learning (CL) and inference at only 0.5% area overhead to the inference logic. (ii) Long temporal dependencies are efficiently captured with temporal convolutional networks (TCNs), enabling the first demonstration of end-to-end on-chip FSL and CL on sequential data and inference on 16-kHz raw audio. (iii) A dual-mode, matrix-multiplication-free compute array allows either matching the power consumption of state-of-the-art inference-only keyword spotting (KWS) accelerators or enabling $4.3\times$ higher peak GOPS. Fabricated in 40-nm CMOS, Chameleon sets new accuracy records on Omniglot for end-to-end on-chip FSL (96.8%, 5-way 1-shot, 98.8%, 5-way 5-shot) and CL (82.2% final accuracy for learning 250 classes with 10 shots), while maintaining an inference accuracy of 93.3% on the 12-class Google Speech Commands dataset at an extreme-edge power budget of 3.1 $μ$W.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2505_24852
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Chameleon: A MatMul-Free Temporal Convolutional Network Accelerator for End-to-End Few-Shot and Continual Learning from Sequential Data
Blanken, Douwe den
Frenkel, Charlotte
Hardware Architecture
Machine Learning
C.3; B.6.0; B.7.0; I.2.6; B.5.0
On-device learning at the edge enables low-latency, private personalization with improved long-term robustness and reduced maintenance costs. Yet, achieving scalable, low-power end-to-end on-chip learning, especially from real-world sequential data with a limited number of examples, is an open challenge. Indeed, accelerators supporting error backpropagation optimize for learning performance at the expense of inference efficiency, while simplified learning algorithms often fail to reach acceptable accuracy targets. In this work, we present Chameleon, leveraging three key contributions to solve these challenges. (i) A unified learning and inference architecture supports few-shot learning (FSL), continual learning (CL) and inference at only 0.5% area overhead to the inference logic. (ii) Long temporal dependencies are efficiently captured with temporal convolutional networks (TCNs), enabling the first demonstration of end-to-end on-chip FSL and CL on sequential data and inference on 16-kHz raw audio. (iii) A dual-mode, matrix-multiplication-free compute array allows either matching the power consumption of state-of-the-art inference-only keyword spotting (KWS) accelerators or enabling $4.3\times$ higher peak GOPS. Fabricated in 40-nm CMOS, Chameleon sets new accuracy records on Omniglot for end-to-end on-chip FSL (96.8%, 5-way 1-shot, 98.8%, 5-way 5-shot) and CL (82.2% final accuracy for learning 250 classes with 10 shots), while maintaining an inference accuracy of 93.3% on the 12-class Google Speech Commands dataset at an extreme-edge power budget of 3.1 $μ$W.
title Chameleon: A MatMul-Free Temporal Convolutional Network Accelerator for End-to-End Few-Shot and Continual Learning from Sequential Data
topic Hardware Architecture
Machine Learning
C.3; B.6.0; B.7.0; I.2.6; B.5.0
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.24852