论文标题
基于机器学习的自加密近似计算
Machine Learning-Based Self-Compensating Approximate Computing
论文作者
论文摘要
专用硬件加速器适合并行计算任务。此外,他们有接受不精确结果的趋势。这些硬件加速器广泛用于图像处理和计算机视觉应用程序,例如处理自动驾驶汽车所需的密集的3-D地图。可以大约为减少功耗和/或处理时间而设计这种容忍的硬件加速器。但是,由于对于某些输入,输出错误可能达到不可接受的级别,因此主要的挑战是\ textIt {增强近似加速器结果的准确性},并将误差幅度保持在允许的范围内。为了实现这一目标,在本文中,我们提出了一种基于机器学习的新型自我补偿近似加速器,用于节能系统。所提出的错误\ textIt {补偿模块}集成在近似硬件加速器的体系结构中,可有效地减少其输出处的累积错误。它利用\ textit {轻量监督的机器学习技术,即决策树}来捕获错误的输入依赖关系。我们考虑在乘法模式下进行图像混合应用,以证明自加薪近似计算的实际应用。仿真结果表明,提议的自加密性近似加速器的设计可以实现约9 \%的精度增强,并且在其他性能度量中可以忽略不计的开销,即功率,面积,延迟和能量。
Dedicated hardware accelerators are suitable for parallel computational tasks. Moreover, they have the tendency to accept inexact results. These hardware accelerators are extensively used in image processing and computer vision applications, e.g., to process the dense 3-D maps required for self-driving cars. Such error-tolerant hardware accelerators can be designed approximately for reduced power consumption and/or processing time. However, since for some inputs the output errors may reach unacceptable levels, the main challenge is to \textit{enhance the accuracy} of the results of approximate accelerators and keep the error magnitude within an allowed range. Towards this goal, in this paper, we propose a novel machine learning-based self-compensating approximate accelerators for energy efficient systems. The proposed error \textit{compensation module}, which is integrated within the architecture of approximate hardware accelerators, efficiently reduces the accumulated error at its output. It utilizes \textit{lightweight supervised machine learning techniques, i.e., decision tree}, to capture input dependency of the error. We consider image blending application in multiplication mode to demonstrate a practical application of self-compensating approximate computing. Simulation results show that the proposed design of self-compensating approximate accelerator can achieve about 9\% accuracy enhancement, with negligible overhead in other performance measures, i.e., power, area, delay and energy.