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Agent-Based Model (ABM) validation is crucial as it helps ensuring the reliability of simulations, and causal discovery has become a powerful tool in this context. However, current causal discovery methods often face accuracy and robustness challenges when applied to complex and noisy time series data, which is typical in ABM scenarios. This study addresses these issues by proposing a Robust Cross-Validation (RCV) approach to enhance causal structure learning for ABM validation. We develop RCV-VarLiNGAM and RCV-PCMCI, novel extensions of two prominent causal discovery algorithms. These aim to reduce the impact of noise better and give more reliable causal relation results, even with high-dimensional, time-dependent data. The proposed approach is then integrated into an enhanced ABM validation framework, which is designed to handle diverse data and model structures. The approach is evaluated using synthetic datasets and a complex simulated fMRI dataset. The results demonstrate greater reliability in causal structure identification. The study examines how various characteristics of datasets affect the performance of established causal discovery methods. These characteristics include linearity, noise distribution, stationarity, and causal structure density. This analysis is then extended to the RCV method to see how it compares in these different situations. This examination helps confirm whether the results are consistent with existing literature and also reveals the strengths and weaknesses of the novel approaches. By tackling key methodological challenges, the study aims to enhance ABM validation with a more resilient valuation framework presented. These improvements increase the reliability of model-driven decision making processes in complex systems analysis.

Causal discovery identifies causal relationships in data, but the task is more complex for multivariate time series due to the computational demands of methods like VarLiNGAM, which combines a Vector Autoregressive Model with a Linear Non-Gaussian Acyclic Model. This study optimizes causal discovery specifically for time series data, which are common in practical applications. Time series causal discovery is particularly challenging because of temporal dependencies and potential time lag effects. By developing a specialized dataset generator and reducing the computational complexity of the VarLiNGAM model from \( O(m^3 \cdot n) \) to \( O(m^3 + m^2 \cdot n) \), this study enhances the feasibility of processing large datasets. The proposed methods were validated on advanced computational platforms and tested on simulated, real-world, and large-scale datasets, demonstrating improved efficiency and performance. The optimized algorithm achieved 7 to 13 times speedup compared to the original and about 4.5 times speedup compared to the GPU-accelerated version on large-scale datasets with feature sizes from 200 to 400. Our methods extend current causal discovery capabilities, making them more robust, scalable, and applicable to real-world scenarios, facilitating advancements in fields like healthcare and finance.

Accurate and reliable Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) analysis is particularly important for adaptive radiotherapy, a recent medical advance capable of improving cancer diagnosis and treatment. Recent studies have shown that IVIM-NET, a deep neural network (DNN), can achieve high accuracy in MRI analysis, indicating the potential of deep learning to enhance diagnostic capabilities in healthcare. However, IVIM-NET does not provide calibrated uncertainty information needed for reliable and trustworthy predictions in healthcare. Moreover, the expensive computation and memory demands of IVIM-NET reduce hardware performance, hindering widespread adoption in realistic scenarios. To address these challenges, this paper proposes an algorithm-hardware co-optimization flow for high-performance and reliable MRI analysis. At the algorithm level, a transformation design flow is introduced to convert IVIM-NET to a mask-based Bayesian Neural Network (BayesNN), facilitating reliable and efficient uncertainty estimation. At the hardware level, we propose an FPGA-based accelerator with several hardware optimizations, such as mask-zero skipping and operation reordering. Experimental results demonstrate that our co-design approach can satisfy the uncertainty requirements of MRI analysis, while achieving 7.5 times and 32.5 times speedup on an Xilinx VU13P FPGA compared to GPU and CPU implementations with reduced power consumption., Comment: The 35th IEEE International Conference on Application-specific Systems, Architectures and Processors (ASAP) 2024

A number of companies recently worked together to release the new Open Compute Project MX standard for low-precision computation, aimed at efficient neural network implementation. In this paper, we describe and evaluate the first open-source FPGA implementation of the arithmetic defined in the standard. Our designs fully support all the standard's concrete formats for conversion into and out of MX formats and for the standard-defined arithmetic operations, as well as arbitrary fixed-point and floating-point formats. Certain elements of the standard are left as implementation-defined, and we present the first concrete FPGA-inspired choices for these elements, which we outline in the paper. Our library of optimized hardware components is available open source, and can be used to build larger systems. For this purpose, we also describe and release an open-source Pytorch library for quantization into the new standard, integrated with the Brevitas library so that the community can develop novel neural network designs quantized with MX formats in mind. We demonstrate the usability and efficacy of our libraries via the implementation of example neural networks such as ResNet-18 on the ImageNet ILSVRC12 dataset. Our testing shows that MX is very effective for formats such as INT5 or FP6 which are not natively supported on GPUs. This gives FPGAs an advantage as they have the flexibility to implement a custom datapath and take advantage of the smaller area footprints offered by these formats., Comment: 8 pages, 4 figures

The increasing deployment of artificial intelligence (AI) for critical decision-making amplifies the necessity for trustworthy AI, where uncertainty estimation plays a pivotal role in ensuring trustworthiness. Dropout-based Bayesian Neural Networks (BayesNNs) are prominent in this field, offering reliable uncertainty estimates. Despite their effectiveness, existing dropout-based BayesNNs typically employ a uniform dropout design across different layers, leading to suboptimal performance. Moreover, as diverse applications require tailored dropout strategies for optimal performance, manually optimizing dropout configurations for various applications is both error-prone and labor-intensive. To address these challenges, this paper proposes a novel neural dropout search framework that automatically optimizes both the dropout-based BayesNNs and their hardware implementations on FPGA. We leverage one-shot supernet training with an evolutionary algorithm for efficient dropout optimization. A layer-wise dropout search space is introduced to enable the automatic design of dropout-based BayesNNs with heterogeneous dropout configurations. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our proposed framework can effectively find design configurations on the Pareto frontier. Compared to manually-designed dropout-based BayesNNs on GPU, our search approach produces FPGA designs that can achieve up to 33X higher energy efficiency. Compared to state-of-the-art FPGA designs of BayesNN, the solutions from our approach can achieve higher algorithmic performance and energy efficiency., Comment: Design Automation Conference (DAC) 2024

Reliable uncertainty estimation plays a crucial role in various safety-critical applications such as medical diagnosis and autonomous driving. In recent years, Bayesian neural networks (BayesNNs) have gained substantial research and industrial interests due to their capability to make accurate predictions with reliable uncertainty estimation. However, the algorithmic complexity and the resulting hardware performance of BayesNNs hinder their adoption in real-life applications. To bridge this gap, this paper proposes an algorithm and hardware co-design framework that can generate field-programmable gate array (FPGA)-based accelerators for efficient BayesNNs. At the algorithm level, we propose novel multi-exit dropout-based BayesNNs with reduced computational and memory overheads while achieving high accuracy and quality of uncertainty estimation. At the hardware level, this paper introduces a transformation framework that can generate FPGA-based accelerators for the proposed efficient multi-exit BayesNNs. Several optimization techniques such as the mix of spatial and temporal mappings are introduced to reduce resource consumption and improve the overall hardware performance. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that our approach can achieve higher energy efficiency compared to CPU, GPU, and other state-of-the-art hardware implementations. To support the future development of this research, we have open-sourced our code at: https://github.com/os-hxfan/MCME_FPGA_Acc.git, Comment: arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:2308.06849

Aggregation queries are a series of computationally-demanding analytics operations on grouped and/or time series (streaming) data. They include tasks such as summation or finding the mean among the items of a group (sharing a group ID) or within the last N observed tuples. They have a wide range of applications including in database analytics, operating systems, bank security and medical sensors. Existing challenges include the increased hardware utilisation and random memory access patterns that result from hash-based approaches or multi-tasking as a way to introduce parallelism. There are also challenges relating to the degree of which the function can be calculated incrementally for sliding windows, such as with overlapping windows. This paper presents a pipelined and reconfigurable approach for calculating a wide range of aggregation queries with minimal hardware overhead.

The auto-regressive decoding of Large Language Models (LLMs) results in significant overheads in their hardware performance. While recent research has investigated various speculative decoding techniques for multi-token generation, these efforts have primarily focused on improving processing speed such as throughput. Crucially, they often neglect other metrics essential for real-life deployments, such as memory consumption and training cost. To overcome these limitations, we propose a novel parallel prompt decoding that requires only $0.0002$% trainable parameters, enabling efficient training on a single A100-40GB GPU in just 16 hours. Inspired by the human natural language generation process, $PPD$ approximates outputs generated at future timesteps in parallel by using multiple prompt tokens. This approach partially recovers the missing conditional dependency information necessary for multi-token generation, resulting in up to a 28% higher acceptance rate for long-range predictions. Furthermore, we present a hardware-aware dynamic sparse tree technique that adaptively optimizes this decoding scheme to fully leverage the computational capacities on different GPUs. Through extensive experiments across LLMs ranging from MobileLlama to Vicuna-13B on a wide range of benchmarks, our approach demonstrates up to 2.49$\times$ speedup and maintains a minimal runtime memory overhead of just $0.0004$%. More importantly, our parallel prompt decoding can serve as an orthogonal optimization for synergistic integration with existing speculative decoding, showing up to $1.22\times$ further speed improvement. Our code is available at https://github.com/hmarkc/parallel-prompt-decoding., Comment: The code for this implementation is available at https://github.com/hmarkc/parallel-prompt-decoding

Three machine learning models are used to perform jet origin classification. These models are optimized for deployment on a field-programmable gate array device. In this context, we demonstrate how latency and resource consumption scale with the input size and choice of algorithm. Moreover, the models proposed here are designed to work on the type of data and under the foreseen conditions at the CERN LHC during its high-luminosity phase. Through quantization-aware training and efficient synthetization for a specific field programmable gate array, we show that $O(100)$ ns inference of complex architectures such as Deep Sets and Interaction Networks is feasible at a relatively low computational resource cost., Comment: 13 pages, 3 figures, 3 tables. Mach. Learn.: Sci. Technol (2024)

We propose the Chiarella-Heston model, a new agent-based model for improving the effectiveness of deep hedging strategies. This model includes momentum traders, fundamental traders, and volatility traders. The volatility traders participate in the market by innovatively following a Heston-style volatility signal. The proposed model generalises both the extended Chiarella model and the Heston stochastic volatility model, and is calibrated to reproduce as many empirical stylized facts as possible. According to the stylised facts distance metric, the proposed model is able to reproduce more realistic financial time series than three baseline models: the extended Chiarella model, the Heston model, and the Geometric Brownian Motion. The proposed model is further validated by the Generalized Subtracted L-divergence metric. With the proposed Chiarella-Heston model, we generate a training dataset to train a deep hedging agent for optimal hedging strategies under various transaction cost levels. The deep hedging agent employs the Deep Deterministic Policy Gradient algorithm and is trained to maximize profits and minimize risks. Our testing results reveal that the deep hedging agent, trained with data generated by our proposed model, outperforms the baseline in most transaction cost levels. Furthermore, the testing process, which is conducted using empirical data, demonstrates the effective performance of the trained deep hedging agent in a realistic trading environment., Comment: Accepted in the 4th ACM International Conference on AI in Finance (ICAIF'23)

Bayesian Neural Networks (BayesNNs) have demonstrated their capability of providing calibrated prediction for safety-critical applications such as medical imaging and autonomous driving. However, the high algorithmic complexity and the poor hardware performance of BayesNNs hinder their deployment in real-life applications. To bridge this gap, this paper proposes a novel multi-exit Monte-Carlo Dropout (MCD)-based BayesNN that achieves well-calibrated predictions with low algorithmic complexity. To further reduce the barrier to adopting BayesNNs, we propose a transformation framework that can generate FPGA-based accelerators for multi-exit MCD-based BayesNNs. Several novel optimization techniques are introduced to improve hardware performance. Our experiments demonstrate that our auto-generated accelerator achieves higher energy efficiency than CPU, GPU, and other state-of-the-art hardware implementations.

This paper introduces a novel optimization framework for deep neural network (DNN) hardware accelerators, enabling the rapid development of customized and automated design flows. More specifically, our approach aims to automate the selection and configuration of low-level optimization techniques, encompassing DNN and FPGA low-level optimizations. We introduce novel optimization and transformation tasks for building design-flow architectures, which are highly customizable and flexible, thereby enhancing the performance and efficiency of DNN accelerators. Our results demonstrate considerable reductions of up to 92\% in DSP usage and 89\% in LUT usage for two networks, while maintaining accuracy and eliminating the need for human effort or domain expertise. In comparison to state-of-the-art approaches, our design achieves higher accuracy and utilizes three times fewer DSP resources, underscoring the advantages of our proposed framework., Comment: 5 pages, Accepted at FPL'23

This work presents a novel reconfigurable architecture for Low Latency Graph Neural Network (LL-GNN) designs for particle detectors, delivering unprecedented low latency performance. Incorporating FPGA-based GNNs into particle detectors presents a unique challenge since it requires sub-microsecond latency to deploy the networks for online event selection with a data rate of hundreds of terabytes per second in the Level-1 triggers at the CERN Large Hadron Collider experiments. This paper proposes a novel outer-product based matrix multiplication approach, which is enhanced by exploiting the structured adjacency matrix and a column-major data layout. Moreover, a fusion step is introduced to further reduce the end-to-end design latency by eliminating unnecessary boundaries. Furthermore, a GNN-specific algorithm-hardware co-design approach is presented which not only finds a design with a much better latency but also finds a high accuracy design under given latency constraints. To facilitate this, a customizable template for this low latency GNN hardware architecture has been designed and open-sourced, which enables the generation of low-latency FPGA designs with efficient resource utilization using a high-level synthesis tool. Evaluation results show that our FPGA implementation is up to 9.0 times faster and achieves up to 13.1 times higher power efficiency than a GPU implementation. Compared to the previous FPGA implementations, this work achieves 6.51 to 16.7 times lower latency. Moreover, the latency of our FPGA design is sufficiently low to enable deployment of GNNs in a sub-microsecond, real-time collider trigger system, enabling it to benefit from improved accuracy. The proposed LL-GNN design advances the next generation of trigger systems by enabling sophisticated algorithms to process experimental data efficiently., Comment: This paper has been accepted by ACM Transactions on Embedded Computing Systems (TECS)

Attention-based neural networks have become pervasive in many AI tasks. Despite their excellent algorithmic performance, the use of the attention mechanism and feed-forward network (FFN) demands excessive computational and memory resources, which often compromises their hardware performance. Although various sparse variants have been introduced, most approaches only focus on mitigating the quadratic scaling of attention on the algorithm level, without explicitly considering the efficiency of mapping their methods on real hardware designs. Furthermore, most efforts only focus on either the attention mechanism or the FFNs but without jointly optimizing both parts, causing most of the current designs to lack scalability when dealing with different input lengths. This paper systematically considers the sparsity patterns in different variants from a hardware perspective. On the algorithmic level, we propose FABNet, a hardware-friendly variant that adopts a unified butterfly sparsity pattern to approximate both the attention mechanism and the FFNs. On the hardware level, a novel adaptable butterfly accelerator is proposed that can be configured at runtime via dedicated hardware control to accelerate different butterfly layers using a single unified hardware engine. On the Long-Range-Arena dataset, FABNet achieves the same accuracy as the vanilla Transformer while reducing the amount of computation by 10 to 66 times and the number of parameters 2 to 22 times. By jointly optimizing the algorithm and hardware, our FPGA-based butterfly accelerator achieves 14.2 to 23.2 times speedup over state-of-the-art accelerators normalized to the same computational budget. Compared with optimized CPU and GPU designs on Raspberry Pi 4 and Jetson Nano, our system is up to 273.8 and 15.1 times faster under the same power budget., Comment: Paper accepted by MICRO'22

This article presents XGB-Chiarella, a powerful new approach for deploying agent-based models to generate realistic intra-day artificial financial price data. This approach is based on agent-based models, calibrated by XGBoost machine learning surrogate. Following the Extended Chiarella model, three types of trading agents are introduced in this agent-based model: fundamental traders, momentum traders, and noise traders. In particular, XGB-Chiarella focuses on configuring the simulation to accurately reflect real market behaviours. Instead of using the original Expectation-Maximisation algorithm for parameter estimation, the agent-based Extended Chiarella model is calibrated using XGBoost machine learning surrogate. It is shown that the machine learning surrogate learned in the proposed method is an accurate proxy of the true agent-based market simulation. The proposed calibration method is superior to the original Expectation-Maximisation parameter estimation in terms of the distance between historical and simulated stylised facts. With the same underlying model, the proposed methodology is capable of generating realistic price time series in various stocks listed at three different exchanges, which indicates the universality of intra-day price formation process. For the time scale (minutes) chosen in this paper, one agent per category is shown to be sufficient to capture the intra-day price formation process. The proposed XGB-Chiarella approach provides insights that the price formation process is comprised of the interactions between momentum traders, fundamental traders, and noise traders. It can also be used to enhance risk management by practitioners., Comment: Published in WILMOTT Magazine: May 2022 issue. arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:2208.13654

This paper describes simulations and analysis of flash crash scenarios in an agent-based modelling framework. We design, implement, and assess a novel high-frequency agent-based financial market simulator that generates realistic millisecond-level financial price time series for the E-Mini S&P 500 futures market. Specifically, a microstructure model of a single security traded on a central limit order book is provided, where different types of traders follow different behavioural rules. The model is calibrated using the machine learning surrogate modelling approach. Statistical test and moment coverage ratio results show that the model has excellent capability of reproducing realistic stylised facts in financial markets. By introducing an institutional trader that mimics the real-world Sell Algorithm on May 6th, 2010, the proposed high-frequency agent-based financial market simulator is used to simulate the Flash Crash that took place that day. We scrutinise the market dynamics during the simulated flash crash and show that the simulated dynamics are consistent with what happened in historical flash crash scenarios. With the help of Monte Carlo simulations, we discover functional relationships between the amplitude of the simulated 2010 Flash Crash and three conditions: the percentage of volume of the Sell Algorithm, the market maker inventory limit, and the trading frequency of fundamental traders. Similar analyses are carried out for mini flash crash events. An innovative "Spiking Trader" is introduced to the model, aiming at precipitating mini flash crash events. We analyse the market dynamics during the course of a typical simulated mini flash crash event and study the conditions affecting its characteristics. The proposed model can be used for testing resiliency and robustness of trading algorithms and providing advice for policymakers.

In this paper, we present FLiMS, a highly-efficient and simple parallel algorithm for merging two sorted lists residing in banked and/or wide memory. On FPGAs, its implementation uses fewer hardware resources than the state-of-the-art alternatives, due to the reduced number of comparators and elimination of redundant logic found on prior attempts. In combination with the distributed nature of the selector stage, a higher performance is achieved for the same amount of parallelism or higher. This is useful in many applications such as in parallel merge trees to achieve high-throughput sorting, where the resource utilisation of the merger is critical for building large trees and internalising the workload for fast computation. Also presented are efficient variations of FLiMS for optimizing throughput for skewed datasets, achieving stable sorting or using fewer dequeue signals. Additionally, FLiMS is shown to perform well as conventional software on modern CPUs supporting single-instruction multiple-data (SIMD) instructions, surpassing the performance of some standard libraries for sorting., Comment: Accepted for publication in the IEEE Transactions on Computers. Extension of the similarly-named FPT 2018 paper, with additional functionality variations, comparisons and experiments

Recent advances in algorithm-hardware co-design for deep neural networks (DNNs) have demonstrated their potential in automatically designing neural architectures and hardware designs. Nevertheless, it is still a challenging optimization problem due to the expensive training cost and the time-consuming hardware implementation, which makes the exploration on the vast design space of neural architecture and hardware design intractable. In this paper, we demonstrate that our proposed approach is capable of locating designs on the Pareto frontier. This capability is enabled by a novel three-phase co-design framework, with the following new features: (a) decoupling DNN training from the design space exploration of hardware architecture and neural architecture, (b) providing a hardware-friendly neural architecture space by considering hardware characteristics in constructing the search cells, (c) adopting Gaussian process to predict accuracy, latency and power consumption to avoid time-consuming synthesis and place-and-route processes. In comparison with the manually-designed ResNet101, InceptionV2 and MobileNetV2, we can achieve up to 5% higher accuracy with up to 3x speed up on the ImageNet dataset. Compared with other state-of-the-art co-design frameworks, our found network and hardware configuration can achieve 2% ~ 6% higher accuracy, 2x ~ 26x smaller latency and 8.5x higher energy efficiency.

This paper presents novel reconfigurable architectures for reducing the latency of recurrent neural networks (RNNs) that are used for detecting gravitational waves. Gravitational interferometers such as the LIGO detectors capture cosmic events such as black hole mergers which happen at unknown times and of varying durations, producing time-series data. We have developed a new architecture capable of accelerating RNN inference for analyzing time-series data from LIGO detectors. This architecture is based on optimizing the initiation intervals (II) in a multi-layer LSTM (Long Short-Term Memory) network, by identifying appropriate reuse factors for each layer. A customizable template for this architecture has been designed, which enables the generation of low-latency FPGA designs with efficient resource utilization using high-level synthesis tools. The proposed approach has been evaluated based on two LSTM models, targeting a ZYNQ 7045 FPGA and a U250 FPGA. Experimental results show that with balanced II, the number of DSPs can be reduced up to 42% while achieving the same IIs. When compared to other FPGA-based LSTM designs, our design can achieve about 4.92 to 12.4 times lower latency., Comment: Accepted at the 2021 32nd IEEE International Conference on Application-specific Systems, Architectures and Processors (ASAP)

This paper presents a novel, non-standard set of vector instruction types for exploring custom SIMD instructions in a softcore. The new types allow simultaneous access to a relatively high number of operands, reducing the instruction count where applicable. Additionally, a high-performance open-source RISC-V (RV32 IM) softcore is introduced, optimised for exploring custom SIMD instructions and streaming performance. By providing instruction templates for instruction development in HDL/Verilog, efficient FPGA-based instructions can be developed with few low-level lines of code. In order to improve custom SIMD instruction performance, the softcore's cache hierarchy is optimised for bandwidth, such as with very wide blocks for the last-level cache. The approach is demonstrated on example memory-intensive applications on an FPGA. Although the exploration is based on the softcore, the goal is to provide a means to experiment with advanced SIMD instructions which could be loaded in future CPUs that feature reconfigurable regions as custom instructions. Finally, we provide some insights on the challenges and effectiveness of such future micro-architectures., Comment: Accepted at the Fifth Workshop on Computer Architecture Research with RISC-V (CARRV 2021), co-located with ISCA 2021

Neural networks have demonstrated their outstanding performance in a wide range of tasks. Specifically recurrent architectures based on long-short term memory (LSTM) cells have manifested excellent capability to model time dependencies in real-world data. However, standard recurrent architectures cannot estimate their uncertainty which is essential for safety-critical applications such as in medicine. In contrast, Bayesian recurrent neural networks (RNNs) are able to provide uncertainty estimation with improved accuracy. Nonetheless, Bayesian RNNs are computationally and memory demanding, which limits their practicality despite their advantages. To address this issue, we propose an FPGA-based hardware design to accelerate Bayesian LSTM-based RNNs. To further improve the overall algorithmic-hardware performance, a co-design framework is proposed to explore the most fitting algorithmic-hardware configurations for Bayesian RNNs. We conduct extensive experiments on healthcare applications to demonstrate the improvement of our design and the effectiveness of our framework. Compared with GPU implementation, our FPGA-based design can achieve up to 10 times speedup with nearly 106 times higher energy efficiency. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work targeting acceleration of Bayesian RNNs on FPGAs., Comment: Accepted to FPT'21. Martin Ferianc and Zhiqiang Que share an equal contribution. Updated copyright footer

Neural networks (NNs) have demonstrated their potential in a wide range of applications such as image recognition, decision making or recommendation systems. However, standard NNs are unable to capture their model uncertainty which is crucial for many safety-critical applications including healthcare and autonomous vehicles. In comparison, Bayesian neural networks (BNNs) are able to express uncertainty in their prediction via a mathematical grounding. Nevertheless, BNNs have not been as widely used in industrial practice, mainly because of their expensive computational cost and limited hardware performance. This work proposes a novel FPGA-based hardware architecture to accelerate BNNs inferred through Monte Carlo Dropout. Compared with other state-of-the-art BNN accelerators, the proposed accelerator can achieve up to 4 times higher energy efficiency and 9 times better compute efficiency. Considering partial Bayesian inference, an automatic framework is proposed, which explores the trade-off between hardware and algorithmic performance. Extensive experiments are conducted to demonstrate that our proposed framework can effectively find the optimal points in the design space., Comment: Design Automation Conference (DAC) 2021

In this work, we present a hardware compatible neural network training algorithm in which we used alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) and iterative least-square methods. The motive behind this approach was to conduct a method of training neural networks that is scalable and can be parallelised. These characteristics make this algorithm suitable for hardware implementation. We have achieved 6.9\% and 6.8\% better accuracy comparing to SGD and Adam respectively, with a four-layer neural network with hidden size of 28 on HIGGS dataset. Likewise, we could observe 21.0\% and 2.2\% accuracy improvement comparing to SGD and Adam respectively, on IRIS dataset with a three-layer neural network with hidden size of 8. This is while the use of matrix inversion, which is challenging for hardware implementation, is avoided in this method. We assessed the impact of avoiding matrix inversion on ADMM accuracy and we observed that we can safely replace matrix inversion with iterative least-square methods and maintain the desired performance. Also, the computational complexity of the implemented method is polynomial regarding dimensions of the input dataset and hidden size of the network.

In this project, we have successfully designed, implemented, deployed and tested a novel FPGA accelerated algorithm for neural network training. The algorithm itself was developed in an independent study option. This training method is based on Alternating Direction Method of Multipliers algorithm, which has strong parallel characteristics and avoids procedures such as matrix inversion that are problematic in hardware designs by employing LSMR. As an intermediate stage, we fully implemented the ADMM-LSMR method in C language for feed-forward neural networks with a flexible number of layers and hidden size. We demonstrated that the method can operate with fixed-point arithmetic without compromising the accuracy. Next, we devised an FPGA accelerated version of the algorithm using Intel FPGA SDK for OpenCL and performed extensive optimisation stages followed by successful deployment of the program on an Intel Arria 10 GX FPGA. The FPGA accelerated program showed up to 6 times speed up comparing to equivalent CPU implementation while achieving promising accuracy.

Field-programmable gate array (FPGA) based accelerators are being widely used for acceleration of convolutional neural networks (CNNs) due to their potential in improving the performance and reconfigurability for specific application instances. To determine the optimal configuration of an FPGA-based accelerator, it is necessary to explore the design space and an accurate performance prediction plays an important role during the exploration. This work introduces a novel method for fast and accurate estimation of latency based on a Gaussian process parametrised by an analytic approximation and coupled with runtime data. The experiments conducted on three different CNNs on an FPGA-based accelerator on Intel Arria 10 GX 1150 demonstrated a 30.7% improvement in accuracy with respect to the mean absolute error in comparison to a standard analytic method in leave-one-out cross-validation., Comment: This article is accepted for publication at ARC'2020

An accurate auditory space map can be learned from auditory experience, for example during development or in response to altered auditory cues such as a modified pinna. We studied neural network models that learn to localise a single sound source in the horizontal plane using binaural cues based on limited supervisions. These supervisions can be unreliable or sparse in real life. First, a simple model that has unreliable estimation of the sound source location is built, in order to simulate the unreliable auditory orienting response of newborns. It is used as a Teacher that acts as a source of unreliable supervisions. Then we show that it is possible to learn a continuous auditory space map based only on noisy left or right feedbacks from the Teacher. Furthermore, reinforcement rewards from the environment are used as a source of sparse supervision. By combining the unreliable innate response and the sparse reinforcement rewards, an accurate auditory space map, which is hard to be achieved by either one of these two kind of supervisions, can eventually be learned. Our results show that the auditory space mapping can be calibrated even without explicit supervision. Moreover, this study implies a possibly more general neural mechanism where multiple sub-modules can be coordinated to facilitate each other's learning process under limited supervisions.

Hyperspectral images (HSIs) can distinguish materials with high number of spectral bands, which is widely adopted in remote sensing applications and benefits in high accuracy land cover classifications. However, HSIs processing are tangled with the problem of high dimensionality and limited amount of labelled data. To address these challenges, this paper proposes a deep learning architecture using three dimensional convolutional neural networks with spectral partitioning to perform effective feature extraction. We conduct experiments using Indian Pines and Salinas scenes acquired by NASA Airborne Visible/Infra-Red Imaging Spectrometer. In comparison to prior results, our architecture shows competitive performance for classification results over current methods., Comment: Accepted for publication in IGARSS'2019

Hyperspectral image (HSI) classification has been widely adopted in applications involving remote sensing imagery analysis which require high classification accuracy and real-time processing speed. Methods based on Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have been proven to achieve state-of-the-art accuracy in classifying HSIs. However, CNN models are often too computationally intensive to achieve real-time response due to the high dimensional nature of HSI, compared to traditional methods such as Support Vector Machines (SVMs). Besides, previous CNN models used in HSI are not specially designed for efficient implementation on embedded devices such as FPGAs. This paper proposes a novel CNN-based algorithm for HSI classification which takes into account hardware efficiency. A customized architecture which enables the proposed algorithm to be mapped effectively onto FPGA resources is then proposed to support real-time on-board classification with low power consumption. Implementation results show that our proposed accelerator on a Xilinx Zynq 706 FPGA board achieves more than 70x faster than an Intel 8-core Xeon CPU and 3x faster than an NVIDIA GeForce 1080 GPU. Compared to previous SVM-based FPGA accelerators, we achieve comparable processing speed but provide a much higher classification accuracy., Comment: This article is accepted for publication at ARC'2019

We present Pangloss, an efficient high-performance data prefetcher that approximates a Markov chain on delta transitions. With a limited information scope and space/logic complexity, it is able to reconstruct a variety of both simple and complex access patterns. This is achieved by a highly-efficient representation of the Markov chain to provide accurate values for transition probabilities. In addition, we have added a mechanism to reconstruct delta transitions originally obfuscated by the out-of-order execution or page transitions, such as when streaming data from multiple sources. Our single-level (L2) prefetcher achieves a geometric speedup of 1.7% and 3.2% over selected state-of-the-art baselines (KPCP and BOP). When combined with an equivalent for the L1 cache (L1 & L2), the speedups rise to 6.8% and 8.4%, and 40.4% over non-prefetch. In the multi-core evaluation, there seems to be a considerable performance improvement as well., Comment: Accepted in The Third Data Prefetching Championship (DPC3), held in conjunction with ISCA 2019

Deep neural networks have proven to be particularly effective in visual and audio recognition tasks. Existing models tend to be computationally expensive and memory intensive, however, and so methods for hardware-oriented approximation have become a hot topic. Research has shown that custom hardware-based neural network accelerators can surpass their general-purpose processor equivalents in terms of both throughput and energy efficiency. Application-tailored accelerators, when co-designed with approximation-based network training methods, transform large, dense and computationally expensive networks into small, sparse and hardware-efficient alternatives, increasing the feasibility of network deployment. In this article, we provide a comprehensive evaluation of approximation methods for high-performance network inference along with in-depth discussion of their effectiveness for custom hardware implementation. We also include proposals for future research based on a thorough analysis of current trends. This article represents the first survey providing detailed comparisons of custom hardware accelerators featuring approximation for both convolutional and recurrent neural networks, through which we hope to inspire exciting new developments in the field., Comment: Accepted manuscript uploaded 21/01/19. DOA 15/01/19

Efficient inference of Convolutional Neural Networks is a thriving topic recently. It is desirable to achieve the maximal test accuracy under given inference budget constraints when deploying a pre-trained model. Network pruning is a commonly used technique while it may produce irregular sparse models that can hardly gain actual speed-up. Group convolution is a promising pruning target due to its regular structure; however, incorporating such structure into the pruning procedure is challenging. It is because structural constraints are hard to describe and can make pruning intractable to solve. The need for configuring group convolution architecture, i.e., the number of groups, that maximises test accuracy also increases difficulty. This paper presents an efficient method to address this challenge. We formulate group convolution pruning as finding the optimal channel permutation to impose structural constraints and solve it efficiently by heuristics. We also apply local search to exploring group configuration based on estimated pruning cost to maximise test accuracy. Compared to prior work, results show that our method produces competitive group convolution models for various tasks within a shorter pruning period and enables rapid group configuration exploration subject to inference budget constraints., Comment: Published as an ICCV'19 NEUARCH workshop paper

FPGA becomes a popular technology for implementing Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) in recent years. Most CNN applications on FPGA are domain-specific, e.g., detecting objects from specific categories, in which commonly-used CNN models pre-trained on general datasets may not be efficient enough. This paper presents TuRF, an end-to-end CNN acceleration framework to efficiently deploy domain-specific applications on FPGA by transfer learning that adapts pre-trained models to specific domains, replacing standard convolution layers with efficient convolution blocks, and applying layer fusion to enhance hardware design performance. We evaluate TuRF by deploying a pre-trained VGG-16 model for a domain-specific image recognition task onto a Stratix V FPGA. Results show that designs generated by TuRF achieve better performance than prior methods for the original VGG-16 and ResNet-50 models, while for the optimised VGG-16 model TuRF designs are more accurate and easier to process.

In the near future FPGAs will be available by the hour, however this new Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) usage mode presents both an opportunity and a challenge: The opportunity is that programmers can potentially trade resources for performance on a much larger scale, for much shorter periods of time than before. The challenge is in finding and traversing the trade-off for heterogeneous IaaS that guarantees increased resources result in the greatest possible increased performance. Such a trade-off is Pareto optimal. The Pareto optimal trade-off for clusters of heterogeneous resources can be found by solving multiple, multi-objective optimisation problems, resulting in an optimal allocation of tasks to the available platforms. Solving these optimisation programs can be done using simple heuristic approaches or formal Mixed Integer Linear Programming (MILP) techniques. When pricing 128 financial options using a Monte Carlo algorithm upon a heterogeneous cluster of Multicore CPU, GPU and FPGA platforms, the MILP approach produces a trade-off that is up to 110% faster than a heuristic approach, and over 50% cheaper. These results suggest that high quality performance-resource trade-offs of heterogeneous IaaS are best realised through a formal optimisation approach., Comment: Presented at Second International Workshop on FPGAs for Software Programmers (FSP 2015) (arXiv:1508.06320)