Neural networks in embedded systems confront computational efficiency and energy consumption challenges arising from neural network inference. Although existing approximate computing techniques can reduce energy consumption, they lack runtime-reconfigurable approximation levels, making it difficult to meet the precision requirements of diverse scenarios. In this paper, we propose a time-efficient methodology that maps runtime-reconfigurable approximate multipliers to weight intervals while respecting tight accuracy-loss thresholds. It jointly considers per-layer computational volume and weight-interval fault-tolerance in 8-bit quantized networks, addressing prior neglect of volume disparities and misjudged weight significance. Experiments on CIFAR-10, CIFAR100 and GTSRB show that our method achieves average energy savings of 21.82% (up to 24.7%) on ResNet and outperforms state-of-the-art methods by \({>}\) 20% on VGG. Configuration completes in 0.6 h on GPU, yielding a 7.5x speedup over prior works.

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Weight-and-Load-Driven Approximation Methodology for Energy-Efficient Neural Network Accelerators

  • Zhiqiang Wen,
  • Jianmin Zhang,
  • Yan Sun,
  • Shangshang Yao

摘要

Neural networks in embedded systems confront computational efficiency and energy consumption challenges arising from neural network inference. Although existing approximate computing techniques can reduce energy consumption, they lack runtime-reconfigurable approximation levels, making it difficult to meet the precision requirements of diverse scenarios. In this paper, we propose a time-efficient methodology that maps runtime-reconfigurable approximate multipliers to weight intervals while respecting tight accuracy-loss thresholds. It jointly considers per-layer computational volume and weight-interval fault-tolerance in 8-bit quantized networks, addressing prior neglect of volume disparities and misjudged weight significance. Experiments on CIFAR-10, CIFAR100 and GTSRB show that our method achieves average energy savings of 21.82% (up to 24.7%) on ResNet and outperforms state-of-the-art methods by \({>}\) 20% on VGG. Configuration completes in 0.6 h on GPU, yielding a 7.5x speedup over prior works.