記憶體內運算電路在涉及大量平行運算的仿神經計算與實現高能源效率方面顯示出極好的潛力。記憶體內運算特別適用於需要執行大量矩陣向量乘法的卷積神經網路。
在本研究中，考慮靜態記憶體內運算的硬體侷限性以及運算的特性，提出了一個實現壓縮卷積神經網路的剪枝框架。通過考慮靜態記憶體內運算的平行運算特性，和每次運算輸入及輸出的數量，提出了基於靜態記憶體內運算的剪枝結構，本論文透過組稀疏化演算法在神經網路訓練的過程中，針對所設計的剪枝結構進行稀疏化，使訓練後的神經網路產生大量為零的權重，大幅減少記憶體的存取需求。此外，本論文更進一步提出可調式正則項來平衡網路每一層的稀疏化比例，使得計算量較大的層可以獲得更高的稀疏比例，並利用交替方向乘子法在網路微調的過程中進一步約束了每個卷積核的權重數目以簡化硬體加速器設計。
本研究通過所提出的可調式正則項訓練演算法應用於VGG16，ResNet20以及ResNet18上，分別進行CIFAR-10與CIFAR-100圖像分類來驗證方法的成效，實驗結果顯示，經過剪枝的網路可以達到20倍以上的參數壓縮量，另外，在這樣的條件下，與使用固定正則項參數的組稀疏化演算法相比， VGG16和ResNet18可以減少超過20%的乘法運算量，同時在CIFAR-10和CIFAR-100上皆僅有1%左右的準確率下降。最後，本演算法在硬體上模擬可達到超過5倍的加速。

Computing in-memory(CIM) exhibits excellent potential for AI accelerator involving massive parallel computations and for achieving high energy efficiency. CIM is especially suitable for convolutional neural networks (CNNs), which need to perform large amounts of matrix-vector multiplications.
In this research, we propose a model compression framework of implementing pruning algorithm on SRAM-CIM hardware accelerator. By considering the parallel operation characteristics and the number of inputs and outputs of SRAM-CIM, a custom pruning structure is proposed. This work uses sparsity training method to gather the zero weight tensor into predefined pattern to fit the CIM macro. Furthermore, to optimize the performance of the neural network inference when deploy on CIM, this work proposes an adaptive regularization sparsity training algorithm to balance the sparsity ratio of each layer of the neural network, so that the layer with a larger computation requirement can obtain a higher sparsity ratio. In the last, this work adopts the ADMM (Alternating Direction Method of Multipliers) to constraint the non-zero weight number in the kernel to simplify the hardware design.
We evaluated the performance of the proposed model compression framework on CIFAR-10 and CIFAR-100 image classification tasks by the ResNet20 and the two large networks of VGG16 and ResNet18. The experiment results show that the network after pruning can achieve more than 20 times compression rates and over 80% flop reduction. In addition, compare to the traditional sparsity training, our proposed method has more than 20% flop reduction. Also, comparing to the network without pruning, the pruning networks can achieve more than 5 times speed up when deploy on SRAM-CIM hardware accelerator.

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