The disparity between the computational demands of deep learning and the capabilities of compute hardware is expanding drastically. Although deep learning achieves remarkable performance in countless tasks, its escalating requirements for computational power and energy consumption surpass the sustainable limits of even specialized neural processing units, including the Apple Neural Engine and NVIDIA TensorCores. This challenge is intensified by the slowdown in CMOS scaling. Analog computing presents a promising alternative, offering substantial improvements in energy efficiency by directly manipulating physical quantities such as current, voltage, charge, or photons. However, it is inherently vulnerable to manufacturing variations, nonlinearities, and noise, leading to degraded prediction accuracy. One of the most effective techniques for enhancing robustness, Noisy Training, introduces noise during the training phase to reinforce the model against disturbances encountered during inference. Although highly effective, its performance degrades in real-world environments where noise characteristics fluctuate due to external factors such as temperature variations and temporal drift. This study underscores the necessity of Noisy Training while revealing its fundamental limitations in the presence of dynamic noise. To address these challenges, we propose Variance-Aware Noisy Training, a novel approach that mitigates performance degradation by incorporating noise schedules which emulate the evolving noise conditions encountered during inference. Our method substantially improves model robustness, without training overhead. Through experiments on image classification tasks in dynamic noise environments, we demonstrate a significant increase in robustness, from 79.3% with conventional Noisy Training to 97.6% with Variance-Aware Noisy Training on CIFAR-10 and from 32.4% to 99.7% on Tiny ImageNet.

错误:搜索内容不能为空,请输入英文关键词
错误:关键词超出字数限制,请精简
高级检索

Variance-Aware Noisy Training: Hardening DNNs Against Unstable Analog Computations

  • Xiao Wang,
  • Hendrik Borras,
  • Bernhard Klein,
  • Holger Fröning

摘要

The disparity between the computational demands of deep learning and the capabilities of compute hardware is expanding drastically. Although deep learning achieves remarkable performance in countless tasks, its escalating requirements for computational power and energy consumption surpass the sustainable limits of even specialized neural processing units, including the Apple Neural Engine and NVIDIA TensorCores. This challenge is intensified by the slowdown in CMOS scaling. Analog computing presents a promising alternative, offering substantial improvements in energy efficiency by directly manipulating physical quantities such as current, voltage, charge, or photons. However, it is inherently vulnerable to manufacturing variations, nonlinearities, and noise, leading to degraded prediction accuracy. One of the most effective techniques for enhancing robustness, Noisy Training, introduces noise during the training phase to reinforce the model against disturbances encountered during inference. Although highly effective, its performance degrades in real-world environments where noise characteristics fluctuate due to external factors such as temperature variations and temporal drift. This study underscores the necessity of Noisy Training while revealing its fundamental limitations in the presence of dynamic noise. To address these challenges, we propose Variance-Aware Noisy Training, a novel approach that mitigates performance degradation by incorporating noise schedules which emulate the evolving noise conditions encountered during inference. Our method substantially improves model robustness, without training overhead. Through experiments on image classification tasks in dynamic noise environments, we demonstrate a significant increase in robustness, from 79.3% with conventional Noisy Training to 97.6% with Variance-Aware Noisy Training on CIFAR-10 and from 32.4% to 99.7% on Tiny ImageNet.