Torch2Chip: An End-to-end Customizable Deep Neural Network Compression and Deployment Toolkit for Prototype Hardware Accelerator Design

The development of model compression is continuously motivated by the evolution of various neural network accelerators with ASIC or FPGA. On the algorithm side, the ultimate goal of quantization or pruning is accelerating the expensive DNN computations on low-power hardware. However, such a "design-and-deploy" workflow faces under-explored challenges in the current hardware-algorithm co-design community. First, although the state-of-the-art quantization algorithm can achieve low precision with negligible degradation of accuracy, the latest deep learning framework (e.g., PyTorch) can only support non-customizable 8-bit precision, data format, and parameter extraction. Secondly, the objective of quantization is to enable the computation with low-precision data. However, the current SoTA algorithm treats the quantized integer as an intermediate result, while the final output of the quantizer is the "discretized" floating-point values, ignoring the practical needs and adding additional workload to hardware designers for integer parameter extraction and layer fusion. Finally, the compression toolkits designed by the industry are constrained to their in-house product or a handful of algorithms. The limited degree of freedom in the current toolkit and the under-explored customization hinder the prototype ASIC or FPGA-based accelerator design. To resolve these challenges, we propose Torch2Chip, an open-sourced, fully customizable, and high-performance toolkit that supports user-designed compression followed by automatic model fusion and parameter extraction. Torch2Chip incorporates the hierarchical design workflow, and the user-customized compression algorithm will be directly packed into the deployment-ready format for prototype chip verification with either CNN or vision transformer (ViT). The code is available at https://github.com/SeoLabCornell/torch2chip.