CSDSE: Apply Cooperative Search to Solve the Exploration-Exploitation Dilemma of Design Space Exploration

The design and optimization of deep neural network accelerators should sufficiently consider numerous design parameters and physical constraints that render their design spaces massive in scale and complicated in distribution. When confronted with the massive and complicated design spaces, previous works on design space exploration suffer from the exploration-exploitation dilemma and are unable to simultaneously assure optimization efficiency and stability. In order to solve the exploration-exploitation dilemma, we present a novel design space exploration method named CSDSE. CSDSE implements heterogeneous agents separately responsible for exploration or exploitation to search the design space cooperatively and introduces a weighted compact buffer that encourages agents to search in diverse directions and bolsters their global exploration ability. CSDSE is implemented to enhance accelerator design. Compared to former methods, it achieves latency speedups of up to 6.1x and energy reductions of up to 1.3x in different constraint scenarios.