Towards Efficient Deployment of Hybrid SNNs on Neuromorphic and Edge AI Hardware

This paper explores the synergistic potential of neuromorphic and edge computing to create a versatile machine learning (ML) system tailored for processing data captured by dynamic vision sensors. We construct and train hybrid models, blending spiking neural networks (SNNs) and artificial neural networks (ANNs) using PyTorch and Lava frameworks. Our hybrid architecture integrates an SNN for temporal feature extraction and an ANN for classification. We delve into the challenges of deploying such hybrid structures on hardware. Specifically, we deploy individual components on Intel's Neuromorphic Processor Loihi (for SNN) and Jetson Nano (for ANN). We also propose an accumulator circuit to transfer data from the spiking to the non-spiking domain. Furthermore, we conduct comprehensive performance analyses of hybrid SNN-ANN models on a heterogeneous system of neuromorphic and edge AI hardware, evaluating accuracy, latency, power, and energy consumption. Our findings demonstrate that the hybrid spiking networks surpass the baseline ANN model across all metrics and outperform the baseline SNN model in accuracy and latency.

Energy-Efficient Deployment of Machine Learning Workloads on Neuromorphic Hardware

As the technology industry is moving towards implementing tasks such as natural language processing, path planning, image classification, and more on smaller edge computing devices, the demand for more efficient implementations of algorithms and hardware accelerators has become a significant area of research. In recent years, several edge deep learning hardware accelerators have been released that specifically focus on reducing the power and area consumed by deep neural networks (DNNs). On the other hand, spiking neural networks (SNNs) which operate on discrete time-series data, have been shown to achieve substantial power reductions over even the aforementioned edge DNN accelerators when deployed on specialized neuromorphic event-based/asynchronous hardware. While neuromorphic hardware has demonstrated great potential for accelerating deep learning tasks at the edge, the current space of algorithms and hardware is limited and still in rather early development. Thus, many hybrid approaches have been proposed which aim to convert pre-trained DNNs into SNNs. In this work, we provide a general guide to converting pre-trained DNNs into SNNs while also presenting techniques to improve the deployment of converted SNNs on neuromorphic hardware with respect to latency, power, and energy. Our experimental results show that when compared against the Intel Neural Compute Stick 2, Intel's neuromorphic processor, Loihi, consumes up to 27x less power and 5x less energy in the tested image classification tasks by using our SNN improvement techniques.

Static Hand Gesture Recognition for American Sign Language using Neuromorphic Hardware

In this paper, we develop four spiking neural network (SNN) models for two static American Sign Language (ASL) hand gesture classification tasks, i.e., the ASL Alphabet and ASL Digits. The SNN models are deployed on Intel's neuromorphic platform, Loihi, and then compared against equivalent deep neural network (DNN) models deployed on an edge computing device, the Intel Neural Compute Stick 2 (NCS2). We perform a comprehensive comparison between the two systems in terms of accuracy, latency, power consumption, and energy. The best DNN model achieves an accuracy of 99.6% on the ASL Alphabet dataset, whereas the best performing SNN model has an accuracy of 99.44%. For the ASL-Digits dataset, the best SNN model outperforms all of its DNN counterparts with 99.52% accuracy. Moreover, our obtained experimental results show that the Loihi neuromorphic hardware implementations achieve up to 14.67x and 4.09x reduction in power consumption and energy, respectively, when compared to NCS2.