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. 2020 Nov 12:14:598876.
doi: 10.3389/fnins.2020.598876. eCollection 2020.

Unsupervised Adaptive Weight Pruning for Energy-Efficient Neuromorphic Systems

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Unsupervised Adaptive Weight Pruning for Energy-Efficient Neuromorphic Systems

Wenzhe Guo et al. Front Neurosci. .

Abstract

To tackle real-world challenges, deep and complex neural networks are generally used with a massive number of parameters, which require large memory size, extensive computational operations, and high energy consumption in neuromorphic hardware systems. In this work, we propose an unsupervised online adaptive weight pruning method that dynamically removes non-critical weights from a spiking neural network (SNN) to reduce network complexity and improve energy efficiency. The adaptive pruning method explores neural dynamics and firing activity of SNNs and adapts the pruning threshold over time and neurons during training. The proposed adaptation scheme allows the network to effectively identify critical weights associated with each neuron by changing the pruning threshold dynamically over time and neurons. It balances the connection strength of neurons with the previous layer with adaptive thresholds and prevents weak neurons from failure after pruning. We also evaluated improvement in the energy efficiency of SNNs with our method by computing synaptic operations (SOPs). Simulation results and detailed analyses have revealed that applying adaptation in the pruning threshold can significantly improve network performance and reduce the number of SOPs. The pruned SNN with 800 excitatory neurons can achieve a 30% reduction in SOPs during training and a 55% reduction during inference, with only 0.44% accuracy loss on MNIST dataset. Compared with a previously reported online soft pruning method, the proposed adaptive pruning method shows 3.33% higher classification accuracy and 67% more reduction in SOPs. The effectiveness of our method was confirmed on different datasets and for different network sizes. Our evaluation showed that the implementation overhead of the adaptive method regarding speed, area, and energy is negligible in the network. Therefore, this work offers a promising solution for effective network compression and building highly energy-efficient neuromorphic systems in real-time applications.

Keywords: STDP; neuromorphic computing; pattern recognition; pruning; spiking neural networks; unsupervised learning.

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Figures

FIGURE 1
FIGURE 1
Overview of the proposed adaptive pruning process in SNNs. The SNN architecture consists of two layers, an input layer and a winner-take-all (WTA) layer with excitatory and inhibitory neurons connected to each other. Pruning only happens in the synapses from the input layer to the WTA layer. wth is the weight pruning threshold.
FIGURE 2
FIGURE 2
Network dynamics were monitored every 5,000 training images in the SNN with 100 excitatory neurons during training and without pruning. (A) Firing activity. The average of spike counts of 100 excitatory neurons was calculated. (B) Statistics of weight updates Δw with the mean (black) and variance (red).
FIGURE 3
FIGURE 3
(A) The illustration of the online adaptive pruning scheme over time. wth0 is the initial pruning threshold and wth(t) is the pruning threshold at time t. (B) The evolution of the pruning threshold over time with wth0 set as 0.036.
FIGURE 4
FIGURE 4
Simulation results of the online adaptive pruning over time for different adaptation functions in the SNN trained on MNIST dataset with 100 excitatory neurons. (A,C,E) show the network connectivity changes with the initial threshold for the adaptation functions f1, f2, and f3, respectively. (B,D,F) present the accuracy changes with the network connectivity for the adaptation functions f1, f2, and f3, respectively. The connectivity is defined as the percentage of the unpruned weights in the total weights.
FIGURE 5
FIGURE 5
The illustration of the online adaptive pruning scheme over neurons. wthn is the pruning threshold for the n-th group (Gn). Nn is the number of neurons in the n-th group. SI = 50 is used as an example for demonstrating the grouping method based on an example spike count distribution.
FIGURE 6
FIGURE 6
Simulation results of the online adaptive pruning over neurons for different adaptation functions in the SNN trained on MNIST dataset with 100 excitatory neurons. (A,C,E) show the network connectivity changes with the initial threshold for the adaptation functions f1, f2, and f3, respectively. (B,D,F) present the accuracy changes with the connectivity for the adaptation functions f1, f2, and f3, repectively. The connectivity is defined as the percentage of the unpruned weights. The spike interval is set as 30.
FIGURE 7
FIGURE 7
Performance comparison among different adaptation functions in the SNN trained on MNIST dataset with 100 neurons. (A) APT: Online adaptive pruning over time, and (B) APN: Online adaptive pruning over neurons. The spike count interval is set as 30.
FIGURE 8
FIGURE 8
Simulation results of online adaptive pruning over neurons for different spike count intervals (SI) in the SNN trained on MNIST dataset with 100 neurons. (A) Connectivity vs. initial threshold, and (B) Accuracy vs. connectivity. SI = Infinity (Inf) means that there is only one group and hence no adaptation over neurons.
FIGURE 9
FIGURE 9
Comparison among different weight pruning methods in the SNN trained on different datasets. MNIST dataset: (A) 100 excitatory neurons and (B) 800 excitatory neurons. Fashion-MNIST dataset: (C) 100 excitatory neurons and (D) 800 excitatory neurons.
FIGURE 10
FIGURE 10
Trained weight maps on (A) MNIST dataset and (B) Fashion-MNIST dataset in the SNN with 100 neurons without pruning. Each pattern in the maps is formed by arranging the weights associated with each neuron to a 28 × 28 matrix.
FIGURE 11
FIGURE 11
MNIST accuracy results at different connectivity values in the SNN with 100 neurons after applying APTN method. The number of pre-pruning training images was changed from 1,000, 10,000, 20,000, 30,000, 50,000, to 60,000.
FIGURE 12
FIGURE 12
(A) Normalized SOPs/image and (B) a figure of merit (FOM) for different connectivity values are obtained in the SNNs with 100 and 800 excitatory neurons using the online adaptive pruning over time and neuron method.
FIGURE 13
FIGURE 13
Comparison between online weight pruning methods and an online adaptive neuron pruning method in the SNN trained on MNIST dataset with 100 excitatory neurons. (A) Accuracy and (B) normalized SOPs/image change with connectivity. CWP, AWP, and ANP are short for constant weight pruning, adaptive weight pruning, and adaptive neuron pruning, respectively.
FIGURE 14
FIGURE 14
Comparison with the online soft weight pruning method adopted from Shi et al. (2019) in the SNN trained on MNIST dataset with 100 excitatory neurons. (A) Accuracy and (B) normalized SOPs/image change with unpruned weights percentage. Since the soft pruning method does not remove the pruned weights, the connectivity is not applicable as the x axis here. Instead, the unpruned percentage is used, which is defined as the percentage of the unpruned weights in the total weights before pruning.
FIGURE 15
FIGURE 15
Simulation runtime. (A) Total network simulation runtime during training at different network connectivity values after applying the proposed adaptive pruning method APTN. (B) Pruning algorithm runtime percentage over the total network simulation time at different network connectivity values. Different batch sizes were used as 100, 1,000, and 5,000.

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