tinyCLAP: Distilling Constrastive Language-Audio Pretrained Models

Contrastive Language-Audio Pretraining (CLAP) became of crucial importance in the field of audio and speech processing. Its employment ranges from sound event detection to text-to-audio generation. However, one of the main limitations is the considerable amount of data required in the training process and the overall computational complexity during inference. This paper investigates how we can reduce the complexity of contrastive language-audio pre-trained models, yielding an efficient model that we call tinyCLAP. We derive an unimodal distillation loss from first principles and explore how the dimensionality of the shared, multimodal latent space can be reduced via pruning. TinyCLAP uses only 6% of the original Microsoft CLAP parameters with a minimal reduction (less than 5%) in zero-shot classification performance across the three sound event detection datasets on which it was tested

Low-complexity acoustic scene classification in DCASE 2022 Challenge

This paper analyzes the outcome of the Low-Complexity Acoustic Scene Classification task in DCASE 2022 Challenge. The task is a continuation from the previous years. In this edition, the requirement for low-complexity solutions were modified including: a limit of 128 K on the number of parameters, including the zero-valued ones, imposed INT8 numerical format, and a limit of 30 million multiply-accumulate operations at inference time. The provided baseline system is a convolutional neural network which employs post-training quantization of parameters, resulting in 46512 parameters, and 29.23 million multiply-and-accumulate operations, well under the set limits of 128K and 30 million, respectively. The baseline system has a 42.9% accuracy and a log-loss of 1.575 on the development data consisting of audio from 9 different devices. An analysis of the submitted systems will be provided after the challenge deadline.

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.

PhiNets: a scalable backbone for low-power AI at the edge

In the Internet of Things era, where we see many interconnected and heterogeneous mobile and fixed smart devices, distributing the intelligence from the cloud to the edge has become a necessity. Due to limited computational and communication capabilities, low memory and limited energy budget, bringing artificial intelligence algorithms to peripheral devices, such as the end-nodes of a sensor network, is a challenging task and requires the design of innovative methods. In this work, we present PhiNets, a new scalable backbone optimized for deep-learning-based image processing on resource-constrained platforms. PhiNets are based on inverted residual blocks specifically designed to decouple the computational cost, working memory, and parameter memory, thus exploiting all the available resources. With a YoloV2 detection head and Simple Online and Realtime Tracking, the proposed architecture has achieved the state-of-the-art results in (i) detection on the COCO and VOC2012 benchmarks, and (ii) tracking on the MOT15 benchmark. PhiNets reduce the parameter count of 87% to 93% with respect to previous state-of-the-art models (EfficientNetv1, MobileNetv2) and achieve better performance with lower computational cost. Moreover, we demonstrate our approach on a prototype node based on a STM32H743 microcontroller (MCU) with 2MB of internal Flash and 1MB of RAM and achieve power requirements in the order of 10 mW. The code for the PhiNets is publicly available on GitHub.

Enabling energy efficient machine learning on a Ultra-Low-Power vision sensor for IoT

The Internet of Things (IoT) and smart city paradigm includes ubiquitous technology to extract context information in order to return useful services to users and citizens. An essential role in this scenario is often played by computer vision applications, requiring the acquisition of images from specific devices. The need for high-end cameras often penalizes this process since they are power-hungry and ask for high computational resources to be processed. Thus, the availability of novel low-power vision sensors, implementing advanced features like in-hardware motion detection, is crucial for computer vision in the IoT domain. Unfortunately, to be highly energy-efficient, these sensors might worsen the perception performance (e.g., resolution, frame rate, color). Therefore, domain-specific pipelines are usually delivered in order to exploit the full potential of these cameras. This paper presents the development, analysis, and embedded implementation of a realtime detection, classification and tracking pipeline able to exploit the full potential of background filtering Smart Vision Sensors (SVS). The power consumption obtained for the inference - which requires 8ms - is 7.5 mW.

Sound Event Detection with Binary Neural Networks on Tightly Power-Constrained IoT Devices

Sound event detection (SED) is a hot topic in consumer and smart city applications. Existing approaches based on Deep Neural Networks are very effective, but highly demanding in terms of memory, power, and throughput when targeting ultra-low power always-on devices. Latency, availability, cost, and privacy requirements are pushing recent IoT systems to process the data on the node, close to the sensor, with a very limited energy supply, and tight constraints on the memory size and processing capabilities precluding to run state-of-the-art DNNs. In this paper, we explore the combination of extreme quantization to a small-footprint binary neural network (BNN) with the highly energy-efficient, RISC-V-based (8+1)-core GAP8 microcontroller. Starting from an existing CNN for SED whose footprint (815 kB) exceeds the 512 kB of memory available on our platform, we retrain the network using binary filters and activations to match these memory constraints. (Fully) binary neural networks come with a natural drop in accuracy of 12-18% on the challenging ImageNet object recognition challenge compared to their equivalent full-precision baselines. This BNN reaches a 77.9% accuracy, just 7% lower than the full-precision version, with 58 kB (7.2 times less) for the weights and 262 kB (2.4 times less) memory in total. With our BNN implementation, we reach a peak throughput of 4.6 GMAC/s and 1.5 GMAC/s over the full network, including preprocessing with Mel bins, which corresponds to an efficiency of 67.1 GMAC/s/W and 31.3 GMAC/s/W, respectively. Compared to the performance of an ARM Cortex-M4 implementation, our system has a 10.3 times faster execution time and a 51.1 times higher energy-efficiency.

Compact recurrent neural networks for acoustic event detection on low-energy low-complexity platforms

Outdoor acoustic events detection is an exciting research field but challenged by the need for complex algorithms and deep learning techniques, typically requiring many computational, memory, and energy resources. This challenge discourages IoT implementation, where an efficient use of resources is required. However, current embedded technologies and microcontrollers have increased their capabilities without penalizing energy efficiency. This paper addresses the application of sound event detection at the edge, by optimizing deep learning techniques on resource-constrained embedded platforms for the IoT. The contribution is two-fold: firstly, a two-stage student-teacher approach is presented to make state-of-the-art neural networks for sound event detection fit on current microcontrollers; secondly, we test our approach on an ARM Cortex M4, particularly focusing on issues related to 8-bits quantization. Our embedded implementation can achieve 68% accuracy in recognition on Urbansound8k, not far from state-of-the-art performance, with an inference time of 125 ms for each second of the audio stream, and power consumption of 5.5 mW in just 34.3 kB of RAM.