BiKA: Kolmogorov-Arnold-Network-inspired Ultra Lightweight Neural Network Hardware Accelerator

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Liu, Yuhao, Ullah, Salim, Kumar, Akash
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2026
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author Liu, Yuhao
Ullah, Salim
Kumar, Akash
author_facet Liu, Yuhao
Ullah, Salim
Kumar, Akash
contents Lightweight neural network accelerators are essential for edge devices with limited resources and power constraints. While quantization and binarization can efficiently reduce hardware cost, they still rely on the conventional Artificial Neural Network (ANN) computation pattern. The recently proposed Kolmogorov-Arnold Network (KAN) presents a novel network paradigm built on learnable nonlinear functions. However, it is computationally expensive for hardware deployment. Inspired by KAN, we propose BiKA, a multiply-free architecture that replaces nonlinear functions with binary, learnable thresholds, introducing an extremely lightweight computational pattern that requires only comparators and accumulators. Our FPGA prototype on Ultra96-V2 shows that BiKA reduces hardware resource usage by 27.73% and 51.54% compared with binarized and quantized neural network systolic array accelerators, while maintaining competitive accuracy. BiKA provides a promising direction for hardware-friendly neural network design on edge devices.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2602_23455
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle BiKA: Kolmogorov-Arnold-Network-inspired Ultra Lightweight Neural Network Hardware Accelerator
Liu, Yuhao
Ullah, Salim
Kumar, Akash
Hardware Architecture
Artificial Intelligence
Lightweight neural network accelerators are essential for edge devices with limited resources and power constraints. While quantization and binarization can efficiently reduce hardware cost, they still rely on the conventional Artificial Neural Network (ANN) computation pattern. The recently proposed Kolmogorov-Arnold Network (KAN) presents a novel network paradigm built on learnable nonlinear functions. However, it is computationally expensive for hardware deployment. Inspired by KAN, we propose BiKA, a multiply-free architecture that replaces nonlinear functions with binary, learnable thresholds, introducing an extremely lightweight computational pattern that requires only comparators and accumulators. Our FPGA prototype on Ultra96-V2 shows that BiKA reduces hardware resource usage by 27.73% and 51.54% compared with binarized and quantized neural network systolic array accelerators, while maintaining competitive accuracy. BiKA provides a promising direction for hardware-friendly neural network design on edge devices.
title BiKA: Kolmogorov-Arnold-Network-inspired Ultra Lightweight Neural Network Hardware Accelerator
topic Hardware Architecture
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.23455