Gradient Decomposition Methods for Training Neural Networks With Non-ideal Synaptic Devices
Abstract
While promising for high-capacity machine learning accelerators, memristor devices have non-idealities that prevent software-equivalent accuracies when used for online training. This work uses a combination of Mini-Batch Gradient Descent (MBGD) to average gradients, stochastic rounding to avoid vanishing weight updates, and decomposition methods to keep the memory overhead low during mini-batch training. Since the weight update has to be transferred to the memristor matrices efficiently, we also investigate the impact of reconstructing the gradient matrixes both internally (rank-seq) and externally (rank-sum) to the memristor array. Our results show that streaming batch principal component analysis (streaming batch PCA) and non-negative matrix factorization (NMF) decomposition algorithms can achieve near MBGD accuracy in a memristor-based multi-layer perceptron trained on the MNIST (Modified National Institute of Standards and Technology) database with only 3 to 10 ranks at significant memory savings. Moreover, NMF rank-seq outperforms streaming batch PCA rank-seq at low-ranks making it more suitable for hardware implementation in future memristor-based accelerators.
Document Details
- Document Type
- Pub Defense Publication
- Publication Date
- Nov 22, 2021
- Source ID
- 10.3389/fnins.2021.749811
Entities
People
- Brian D. Hoskins
- Gina C. Adam
- Junyun Zhao
- Osama Yousuf
- Siyuan Huang
- Yutong Gao
Organizations
- George Washington University
- National Institute of Standards and Technology
- Office of Naval Research