Boosting keyword spotting through on-device learnable user speech characteristics

Keyword spotting systems for always-on TinyML-constrained applications require on-site tuning to boost the accuracy of offline trained classifiers when deployed in unseen inference conditions. Adapting to the speech peculiarities of target users requires many in-domain samples, often unavailable in real-world scenarios. Furthermore, current on-device learning techniques rely on computationally intensive and memory-hungry backbone update schemes, unfit for always-on, battery-powered devices. In this work, we propose a novel on-device learning architecture, composed of a pretrained backbone and a user-aware embedding learning the user's speech characteristics. The so-generated features are fused and used to classify the input utterance. For domain shifts generated by unseen speakers, we measure error rate reductions of up to 19% from 30.1% to 24.3% based on the 35-class problem of the Google Speech Commands dataset, through the inexpensive update of the user projections. We moreover demonstrate the few-shot learning capabilities of our proposed architecture in sample- and class-scarce learning conditions. With 23.7 kparameters and 1 MFLOP per epoch required for on-device training, our system is feasible for TinyML applications aimed at battery-powered microcontrollers.

On-Device Domain Learning for Keyword Spotting on Low-Power Extreme Edge Embedded Systems

Keyword spotting accuracy degrades when neural networks are exposed to noisy environments. On-site adaptation to previously unseen noise is crucial to recovering accuracy loss, and on-device learning is required to ensure that the adaptation process happens entirely on the edge device. In this work, we propose a fully on-device domain adaptation system achieving up to 14% accuracy gains over already-robust keyword spotting models. We enable on-device learning with less than 10 kB of memory, using only 100 labeled utterances to recover 5% accuracy after adapting to the complex speech noise. We demonstrate that domain adaptation can be achieved on ultra-low-power microcontrollers with as little as 806 mJ in only 14 s on always-on, battery-operated devices.

Stella Nera: Achieving 161 TOp/s/W with Multiplier-free DNN Acceleration based on Approximate Matrix Multiplication

From classical HPC to deep learning, MatMul is at the heart of today's computing. The recent Maddness method approximates MatMul without the need for multiplication by using a hash-based version of product quantization (PQ) indexing into a look-up table (LUT). Stella Nera is the first Maddness accelerator and it achieves 15x higher area efficiency (GMAC/s/mm^2) and more than 25x higher energy efficiency (TMAC/s/W) than direct MatMul accelerators implemented in the same technology. The hash function is a decision tree, which allows for an efficient hardware implementation as the multiply-accumulate operations are replaced by decision tree passes and LUT lookups. The entire Maddness MatMul can be broken down into parts that allow an effective implementation with small computing units and memories, allowing it to reach extreme efficiency while remaining generically applicable for MatMul tasks. In a commercial 14nm technology and scaled to 3nm, we achieve an energy efficiency of 161 TOp/s/W@0.55V with a Top-1 accuracy on CIFAR-10 of more than 92.5% using ResNet9.

RL-based Stateful Neural Adaptive Sampling and Denoising for Real-Time Path Tracing

Monte-Carlo path tracing is a powerful technique for realistic image synthesis but suffers from high levels of noise at low sample counts, limiting its use in real-time applications. To address this, we propose a framework with end-to-end training of a sampling importance network, a latent space encoder network, and a denoiser network. Our approach uses reinforcement learning to optimize the sampling importance network, thus avoiding explicit numerically approximated gradients. Our method does not aggregate the sampled values per pixel by averaging but keeps all sampled values which are then fed into the latent space encoder. The encoder replaces handcrafted spatiotemporal heuristics by learned representations in a latent space. Finally, a neural denoiser is trained to refine the output image. Our approach increases visual quality on several challenging datasets and reduces rendering times for equal quality by a factor of 1.6x compared to the previous state-of-the-art, making it a promising solution for real-time applications.

Going Further With Winograd Convolutions: Tap-Wise Quantization for Efficient Inference on 4x4 Tile

Most of today's computer vision pipelines are built around deep neural networks, where convolution operations require most of the generally high compute effort. The Winograd convolution algorithm computes convolutions with fewer MACs compared to the standard algorithm, reducing the operation count by a factor of 2.25x for 3x3 convolutions when using the version with 2x2-sized tiles $F_2$. Even though the gain is significant, the Winograd algorithm with larger tile sizes, i.e., $F_4$, offers even more potential in improving throughput and energy efficiency, as it reduces the required MACs by 4x. Unfortunately, the Winograd algorithm with larger tile sizes introduces numerical issues that prevent its use on integer domain-specific accelerators and higher computational overhead to transform input and output data between spatial and Winograd domains. To unlock the full potential of Winograd $F_4$, we propose a novel tap-wise quantization method that overcomes the numerical issues of using larger tiles, enabling integer-only inference. Moreover, we present custom hardware units that process the Winograd transformations in a power- and area-efficient way, and we show how to integrate such custom modules in an industrial-grade, programmable DSA. An extensive experimental evaluation on a large set of state-of-the-art computer vision benchmarks reveals that the tap-wise quantization algorithm makes the quantized Winograd $F_4$ network almost as accurate as the FP32 baseline. The Winograd-enhanced DSA achieves up to 1.85x gain in energy efficiency and up to 1.83x end-to-end speed-up for state-of-the-art segmentation and detection networks.

Vau da muntanialas: Energy-efficient multi-die scalable acceleration of RNN inference

Recurrent neural networks such as Long Short-Term Memories (LSTMs) learn temporal dependencies by keeping an internal state, making them ideal for time-series problems such as speech recognition. However, the output-to-input feedback creates distinctive memory bandwidth and scalability challenges in designing accelerators for RNNs. We present Muntaniala, an RNN accelerator architecture for LSTM inference with a silicon-measured energy-efficiency of 3.25$TOP/s/W$ and performance of 30.53$GOP/s$ in UMC 65 $nm$ technology. The scalable design of Muntaniala allows running large RNN models by combining multiple tiles in a systolic array. We keep all parameters stationary on every die in the array, drastically reducing the I/O communication to only loading new features and sharing partial results with other dies. For quantifying the overall system power, including I/O power, we built Vau da Muntanialas, to the best of our knowledge, the first demonstration of a systolic multi-chip-on-PCB array of RNN accelerator. Our multi-die prototype performs LSTM inference with 192 hidden states in 330$\mu s$ with a total system power of 9.0$mW$ at 10$MHz$ consuming 2.95$\mu J$. Targeting the 8/16-bit quantization implemented in Muntaniala, we show a phoneme error rate (PER) drop of approximately 3% with respect to floating-point (FP) on a 3L-384NH-123NI LSTM network on the TIMIT dataset.

Sub-mW Keyword Spotting on an MCU: Analog Binary Feature Extraction and Binary Neural Networks

Keyword spotting (KWS) is a crucial function enabling the interaction with the many ubiquitous smart devices in our surroundings, either activating them through wake-word or directly as a human-computer interface. For many applications, KWS is the entry point for our interactions with the device and, thus, an always-on workload. Many smart devices are mobile and their battery lifetime is heavily impacted by continuously running services. KWS and similar always-on services are thus the focus when optimizing the overall power consumption. This work addresses KWS energy-efficiency on low-cost microcontroller units (MCUs). We combine analog binary feature extraction with binary neural networks. By replacing the digital preprocessing with the proposed analog front-end, we show that the energy required for data acquisition and preprocessing can be reduced by 29x, cutting its share from a dominating 85% to a mere 16% of the overall energy consumption for our reference KWS application. Experimental evaluations on the Speech Commands Dataset show that the proposed system outperforms state-of-the-art accuracy and energy efficiency, respectively, by 1% and 4.3x on a 10-class dataset while providing a compelling accuracy-energy trade-off including a 2% accuracy drop for a 71x energy reduction.

Sub-100uW Multispectral Riemannian Classification for EEG-based Brain--Machine Interfaces

Motor imagery brain--machine interfaces enable us to control machines by merely thinking of performing a motor action. Practical use cases require a wearable solution where the classification of the brain signals is done locally near the sensor using machine learning models embedded on energy-efficient microcontroller units, for assured privacy, user comfort, and long-term usage. In this work, we provide practical insights on the accuracy-cost trade-off for embedded BMI solutions. Our multispectral Riemannian classifier reaches 75.1% accuracy on a 4-class MI task. The accuracy is further improved by tuning different types of classifiers to each subject, achieving 76.4%. We further scale down the model by quantizing it to mixed-precision representations with a minimal accuracy loss of 1% and 1.4%, respectively, which is still up to 4.1% more accurate than the state-of-the-art embedded convolutional neural network. We implement the model on a low-power MCU within an energy budget of merely 198uJ and taking only 16.9ms per classification. Classifying samples continuously, overlapping the 3.5s samples by 50% to avoid missing user inputs allows for operation at just 85uW. Compared to related works in embedded MI-BMIs, our solution sets the new state-of-the-art in terms of accuracy-energy trade-off for near-sensor classification.

Reinforcement Learning for Scalable Logic Optimization with Graph Neural Networks

Logic optimization is an NP-hard problem commonly approached through hand-engineered heuristics. We propose to combine graph convolutional networks with reinforcement learning and a novel, scalable node embedding method to learn which local transforms should be applied to the logic graph. We show that this method achieves a similar size reduction as ABC on smaller circuits and outperforms it by 1.5-1.75x on larger random graphs.

ECG-TCN: Wearable Cardiac Arrhythmia Detection with a Temporal Convolutional Network

Personalized ubiquitous healthcare solutions require energy-efficient wearable platforms that provide an accurate classification of bio-signals while consuming low average power for long-term battery-operated use. Single lead electrocardiogram (ECG) signals provide the ability to detect, classify, and even predict cardiac arrhythmia. In this paper, we propose a novel temporal convolutional network (TCN) that achieves high accuracy while still being feasible for wearable platform use. Experimental results on the ECG5000 dataset show that the TCN has a similar accuracy (94.2%) score as the state-of-the-art (SoA) network while achieving an improvement of 16.5% in the balanced accuracy score. This accurate classification is done with 27 times fewer parameters and 37 times less multiply-accumulate operations. We test our implementation on two publicly available platforms, the STM32L475, which is based on ARM Cortex M4F, and the GreenWaves Technologies GAP8 on the GAPuino board, based on 1+8 RISC-V CV32E40P cores. Measurements show that the GAP8 implementation respects the real-time constraints while consuming 0.10 mJ per inference. With 9.91 GMAC/s/W, it is 23.0 times more energy-efficient and 46.85 times faster than an implementation on the ARM Cortex M4F (0.43 GMAC/s/W). Overall, we obtain 8.1% higher accuracy while consuming 19.6 times less energy and being 35.1 times faster compared to a previous SoA embedded implementation.