NOVA: NoC-based Vector Unit for Mapping Attention Layers on a CNN Accelerator

Attention mechanisms are becoming increasingly popular, being used in neural network models in multiple domains such as natural language processing (NLP) and vision applications, especially at the edge. However, attention layers are difficult to map onto existing neuro accelerators since they have a much higher density of non-linear operations, which lead to inefficient utilization of today's vector units. This work introduces NOVA, a NoC-based Vector Unit that can perform non-linear operations within the NoC of the accelerators, and can be overlaid onto existing neuro accelerators to map attention layers at the edge. Our results show that the NOVA architecture is up to 37.8x more power-efficient than state-of-the-art hardware approximators when running existing attention-based neural networks.

Shenjing: A low power reconfigurable neuromorphic accelerator with partial-sum and spike networks-on-chip

The next wave of on-device AI will likely require energy-efficient deep neural networks. Brain-inspired spiking neural networks (SNN) has been identified to be a promising candidate. Doing away with the need for multipliers significantly reduces energy. For on-device applications, besides computation, communication also incurs a significant amount of energy and time. In this paper, we propose Shenjing, a configurable SNN architecture which fully exposes all on-chip communications to software, enabling software mapping of SNN models with high accuracy at low power. Unlike prior SNN architectures like TrueNorth, Shenjing does not require any model modification and retraining for the mapping. We show that conventional artificial neural networks (ANN) such as multilayer perceptron, convolutional neural networks, as well as the latest residual neural networks can be mapped successfully onto Shenjing, realizing ANNs with SNN's energy efficiency. For the MNIST inference problem using a multilayer perceptron, we were able to achieve an accuracy of 96% while consuming just 1.26mW using 10 Shenjing cores.