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Jiachen Ren

Publications and source records attributed to Jiachen Ren.

4 recordsLinked to original sources

NOVA-CIM: Noise- and Correlation-Tolerant Stochastic Interfaces for Analog Compute-in-Memory

Analog compute-in-memory (CIM) enables energy-efficient model acceleration, but its reliance on ADC-based readout, which directly quantizes noisy column currents, makes inference accuracy highly sensitive to analog read noise, active-row scaling, and ADC precision. In this paper, we present NOVA-CIM, a noise- and correlation-tolerant stochastic interface for analog CIM by replacing multi-bit ADC readout with random-reference 1-bit sensing and reconstructing results through lightweight counting. By converting column currents into comparison probabilities, this probability-domain readout averages zero-mean dynamic read noise over stochastic samples while reducing dependence on high-resolution ADCs. We provide a unified robustness analysis showing that dynamic read noise is suppressed through temporal averaging and that spatial input-bitstream correlation increases instantaneous current variance rather than introducing first-order MAC bias. MAC-level experiments and end-to-end evaluation on ViT-Base validate the analysis: under read noise, Top-1 accuracy remains 84.48% near the 84.51% bfloat16 (BF16) baseline; under stochastic number generator (SNG) reuse, MAC bias stays near zero while root-mean-square error (RMSE) and stochastic cross-correlation (SCC) grow as predicted.

cs.AR

PatchINR: Patch-Based Implicit Neural Representations for Efficient and Scalable Inference

Implicit Neural Representation (INR) provides an effective approach for continuous signal modeling, but classical per-pixel inference results in quadratic growth in inference count, leading to dramatically increased computational costs in high-resolution application scenarios. To address this issue, we propose a patch-based approach that treats non-overlapping patches as fundamental processing units and predicts entire pixel patches in a single forward pass, significantly reducing the number of inference queries required. To validate the effectiveness of our approach, we propose a hardware acceleration architecture on the Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) platform for the INR model, which features a configurable pipeline and supports dual-precision computation. Our patch-based INR achieves comparable reconstruction quality to pixel-level INR (34.97 dB PSNR with 2 x 2 patches) while reducing inference latency by 75% with only 0.6% parameter overhead.

cs.CV

QuadINR: Hardware-Efficient Implicit Neural Representations Through Quadratic Activation

Implicit Neural Representations (INRs) encode discrete signals continuously while addressing spectral bias through activation functions (AFs). Previous approaches mitigate this bias by employing complex AFs, which often incur significant hardware overhead. To tackle this challenge, we introduce QuadINR, a hardware-efficient INR that utilizes piecewise quadratic AFs to achieve superior performance with dramatic reductions in hardware consumption. The quadratic functions encompass rich harmonic content in their Fourier series, delivering enhanced expressivity for high-frequency signals, as verified through Neural Tangent Kernel (NTK) analysis. We develop a unified $N$-stage pipeline framework that facilitates efficient hardware implementation of various AFs in INRs. We demonstrate FPGA implementations on the VCU128 platform and an ASIC implementation in a 28nm process. Experiments across images and videos show that QuadINR achieves up to 2.06dB PSNR improvement over prior work, with an area of only 1914$\mu$m$^2$ and a dynamic power of 6.14mW, reducing resource and power consumption by up to 97\% and improving latency by up to 93\% vs existing baselines.

cs.CV

Distribution-Aware Hadamard Quantization for Hardware-Efficient Implicit Neural Representations

Implicit Neural Representations (INRs) encode discrete signals using Multi-Layer Perceptrons (MLPs) with complex activation functions. While INRs achieve superior performance, they depend on full-precision number representation for accurate computation, resulting in significant hardware overhead. Previous INR quantization approaches have primarily focused on weight quantization, offering only limited hardware savings due to the lack of activation quantization. To fully exploit the hardware benefits of quantization, we propose DHQ, a novel distribution-aware Hadamard quantization scheme that targets both weights and activations in INRs. Our analysis shows that the weights in the first and last layers have distributions distinct from those in the intermediate layers, while the activations in the last layer differ significantly from those in the preceding layers. Instead of customizing quantizers individually, we utilize the Hadamard transformation to standardize these diverse distributions into a unified bell-shaped form, supported by both empirical evidence and theoretical analysis, before applying a standard quantizer. To demonstrate the practical advantages of our approach, we present an FPGA implementation of DHQ that highlights its hardware efficiency. Experiments on diverse image reconstruction tasks show that DHQ outperforms previous quantization methods, reducing latency by 32.7\%, energy consumption by 40.1\%, and resource utilization by up to 98.3\% compared to full-precision counterparts.

cs.CV