Quantized rewiring: hardware-aware training of sparse deep neural networks

Mixed-signal and fully digital neuromorphic systems have been of significant interest for deploying spiking neural networks in an energy-efficient manner. However, many of these systems impose constraints in terms of fan-in, memory, or synaptic weight precision that have to be considered during netw...

Full description

Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Horst Petschenig, Robert Legenstein
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: IOP Publishing 2023-01-01
Series:Neuromorphic Computing and Engineering
Subjects:
Online Access:https://doi.org/10.1088/2634-4386/accd8f
Description
Summary:Mixed-signal and fully digital neuromorphic systems have been of significant interest for deploying spiking neural networks in an energy-efficient manner. However, many of these systems impose constraints in terms of fan-in, memory, or synaptic weight precision that have to be considered during network design and training. In this paper, we present quantized rewiring (Q-rewiring), an algorithm that can train both spiking and non-spiking neural networks while meeting hardware constraints during the entire training process. To demonstrate our approach, we train both feedforward and recurrent neural networks with a combined fan-in/weight precision limit, a constraint that is, for example, present in the DYNAP-SE mixed-signal analog/digital neuromorphic processor. Q-rewiring simultaneously performs quantization and rewiring of synapses and synaptic weights through gradient descent updates and projecting the trainable parameters to a constraint-compliant region. Using our algorithm, we find trade-offs between the number of incoming connections to neurons and network performance for a number of common benchmark datasets.
ISSN:2634-4386