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Streaming Memory-Augmented Neural Networks (arxiv.org)
1 point by godelmachine on May 22, 2018 | hide | past | pdf | discuss on HN

In plain words: They built a circuit for question-answering networks with external memory, handling the looping data paths and memory lookups that ordinary chips handle poorly. It ran about 125 times more energy-efficiently than a TITAN V GPU, rising to 140 with a shortcut that skips searches early.

Abstract · Energy-Efficient Inference Accelerator for Memory-Augmented Neural Networks on an FPGA

Memory-augmented neural networks (MANNs) are designed for question-answering tasks. It is difficult to run a MANN effectively on accelerators designed for other neural networks (NNs), in particular on mobile devices, because MANNs require recurrent data paths and various types of operations related to external memory access. We implement an accelerator for MANNs on a field-programmable gate array (FPGA) based on a data flow architecture. Inference times are also reduced by inference thresholding, which is a data-based maximum inner-product search specialized for natural language tasks. Measurements on the bAbI data show that the energy efficiency of the accelerator (FLOPS/kJ) was higher than that of an NVIDIA TITAN V GPU by a factor of about 125, increasing to 140 with inference thresholding

Seongsik Park, Jaehee Jang, Seijoon Kim, Sungroh Yoon
arXiv:1805.07978 · cs.LG, stat.ML · submitted May 21, 2018 · updated Feb 11, 2019
abstract · pdf · html · Accepted to DATE 2019

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