PCNN: Pattern-based Fine-Grained Regular Pruning towards Optimizing CNN Accelerators

Weight pruning is a powerful technique to realize model compression. We propose PCNN, a fine-grained regular 1D pruning method. A novel index format called Sparsity Pattern Mask (SPM) is presented to encode the sparsity in PCNN. Leveraging SPM with limited pruning patterns and non-zero sequences with equal length, PCNN can be efficiently employed in hardware. Evaluated on VGG-16 and ResNet-18, our PCNN achieves the compression rate up to 8.4X with only 0.2% accuracy loss. We also implement a pattern-aware architecture in 55nm process, achieving up to 9.0X speedup and 28.39 TOPS/W efficiency with only 3.1% on-chip memory overhead of indices.

Domain Constraint Approximation based Semi Supervision

Deep learning for supervised learning has achieved astonishing performance in various machine learning applications. However, annotated data is expensive and rare. In practice, only a small portion of data samples are annotated. Pseudo-ensembling-based approaches have achieved state-of-the-art results in computer vision related tasks. However, it still relies on the quality of an initial model built by labeled data. Less labeled data may degrade model performance a lot. Domain constraint is another way regularize the posterior but has some limitation. In this paper, we proposed a fuzzy domain-constraint-based framework which loses the requirement of traditional constraint learning and enhances the model quality for semi supervision. Simulations results show the effectiveness of our design.