Decentor-V: Lightweight ML Training on Low-Power RISC-V Edge Devices

Fuente: arXiv
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Hauptverfasser: Ribeiro, Marcelo, Costa, Diogo, Moreira, Gonçalo, Pinto, Sandro, Gomes, Tiago
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2025
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author Ribeiro, Marcelo
Costa, Diogo
Moreira, Gonçalo
Pinto, Sandro
Gomes, Tiago
author_facet Ribeiro, Marcelo
Costa, Diogo
Moreira, Gonçalo
Pinto, Sandro
Gomes, Tiago
contents Modern IoT devices increasingly rely on machine learning solutions to process data locally. However, the lack of graphics processing units (GPUs) or dedicated accelerators on most platforms makes on-device training largely infeasible, often requiring cloud-based services to perform this task. This procedure often raises privacy-related concerns, and creates dependency on reliable and always-on connectivity. Federated Learning (FL) is a new trend that addresses these issues by enabling decentralized and collaborative training directly on devices, but it requires highly efficient optimization algorithms. L-SGD, a lightweight variant of stochastic gradient descent, has enabled neural network training on Arm Cortex-M Microcontroller Units (MCUs). This work extends L-SGD to RISC-V-based MCUs, an open and emerging architecture that still lacks robust support for on-device training. L-SGD was evaluated on both Arm and RISC-V platforms using 32-bit floating-point arithmetic, highlighting the performance impact of the absence of Floating-Point Units (FPUs) in RISC-V MCUs. To mitigate these limitations, we introduce an 8-bit quantized version of L-SGD for RISC-V, which achieves nearly 4x reduction in memory usage and a 2.2x speedup in training time, with negligible accuracy degradation.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2509_18118
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Decentor-V: Lightweight ML Training on Low-Power RISC-V Edge Devices
Ribeiro, Marcelo
Costa, Diogo
Moreira, Gonçalo
Pinto, Sandro
Gomes, Tiago
Machine Learning
Hardware Architecture
Modern IoT devices increasingly rely on machine learning solutions to process data locally. However, the lack of graphics processing units (GPUs) or dedicated accelerators on most platforms makes on-device training largely infeasible, often requiring cloud-based services to perform this task. This procedure often raises privacy-related concerns, and creates dependency on reliable and always-on connectivity. Federated Learning (FL) is a new trend that addresses these issues by enabling decentralized and collaborative training directly on devices, but it requires highly efficient optimization algorithms. L-SGD, a lightweight variant of stochastic gradient descent, has enabled neural network training on Arm Cortex-M Microcontroller Units (MCUs). This work extends L-SGD to RISC-V-based MCUs, an open and emerging architecture that still lacks robust support for on-device training. L-SGD was evaluated on both Arm and RISC-V platforms using 32-bit floating-point arithmetic, highlighting the performance impact of the absence of Floating-Point Units (FPUs) in RISC-V MCUs. To mitigate these limitations, we introduce an 8-bit quantized version of L-SGD for RISC-V, which achieves nearly 4x reduction in memory usage and a 2.2x speedup in training time, with negligible accuracy degradation.
title Decentor-V: Lightweight ML Training on Low-Power RISC-V Edge Devices
topic Machine Learning
Hardware Architecture
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.18118