Hardware-aware Pruning of DNNs using LFSR-Generated Pseudo-Random Indices

11/09/2019

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by   Foroozan Karimzadeh, et al.

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Deep neural networks (DNNs) have been emerged as the state-of-the-art algorithms in broad range of applications. To reduce the memory foot-print of DNNs, in particular for embedded applications, sparsification techniques have been proposed. Unfortunately, these techniques come with a large hardware overhead. In this paper, we present a hardware-aware pruning method where the locations of non-zero weights are derived in real-time from a Linear Feedback Shift Registers (LFSRs). Using the proposed method, we demonstrate a total saving of energy and area up to 63.96 down-sampled ImageNet, respectively for iso-compression-rate and iso-accuracy.