论文标题
通过噪音吸引归一化的内存神经网络的强大处理
Robust Processing-In-Memory Neural Networks via Noise-Aware Normalization
论文作者
论文摘要
模拟计算硬件,例如内存处理(PIM)加速器,已逐渐因加速神经网络计算而受到更多关注。但是,PIM加速器通常会遭受物理组件中固有的噪声,这对于神经网络模型的挑战是实现与数字硬件相同的性能。以前的减轻固有噪声的工作假设了噪声模型的知识,并且需要相应地对神经网络进行重新训练。在本文中,我们提出了一种噪声不足的方法,以在任何噪声设置中实现强大的神经网络性能。我们的主要观察结果是,性能的降解是由于网络激活的分布变化是由噪声引起的。为了正确跟踪偏移并校准偏置分布,我们提出了一个“噪声吸引”批归归式层,该层能够使模拟环境中固有的变异噪声下的激活分布对齐。我们的方法简单,易于实现,一般到各种噪声设置,并且不需要重新训练模型。我们对计算机视觉中的几个任务进行实验,包括分类,对象检测和语义分割。结果证明了我们方法的有效性,在广泛的噪声设置下实现了稳健的性能,比现有方法更可靠。我们认为,我们简单而通用的方法可以促进采用神经网络的模拟计算设备。
Analog computing hardwares, such as Processing-in-memory (PIM) accelerators, have gradually received more attention for accelerating the neural network computations. However, PIM accelerators often suffer from intrinsic noise in the physical components, making it challenging for neural network models to achieve the same performance as on the digital hardware. Previous works in mitigating intrinsic noise assumed the knowledge of the noise model, and retraining the neural networks accordingly was required. In this paper, we propose a noise-agnostic method to achieve robust neural network performance against any noise setting. Our key observation is that the degradation of performance is due to the distribution shifts in network activations, which are caused by the noise. To properly track the shifts and calibrate the biased distributions, we propose a "noise-aware" batch normalization layer, which is able to align the distributions of the activations under variational noise inherent in the analog environments. Our method is simple, easy to implement, general to various noise settings, and does not need to retrain the models. We conduct experiments on several tasks in computer vision, including classification, object detection and semantic segmentation. The results demonstrate the effectiveness of our method, achieving robust performance under a wide range of noise settings, more reliable than existing methods. We believe that our simple yet general method can facilitate the adoption of analog computing devices for neural networks.