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Mehdi Modarressi

Publications and source records attributed to Mehdi Modarressi.

7 recordsLinked to original sources

DeVIT: Low-Power Vision Transformer Acceleration Using Delta Computation

The emergence of transformer-based deep learning models has brought unprecedented performance across various domains, particularly in natural language processing and computer vision. However, deploying these models, especially on resource-constrained devices, poses significant challenges due to their high computational complexity and large memory size and bandwidth requirements. This complexity has led researchers to use low-bit model weights to reduce memory usage and improve efficiency. In addition to reducing processing and memory demands, quantization introduces another useful property: value locality, where the extremely large number of parameters are restricted to a limited range of values. To fully take advantage of this locality, this paper presents DeVIT, an acceleration method for vision transformers that leverages differential computation to enable multiplier-less matrix multiplication.

cs.CV

Reducing the Complexity of Deep Learning Models for EEG Analysis on Wearable Devices

Wearable healthcare devices are the fastest-growing Internet of Things (IoT) sector. Many automated healthcare services rely on two crucial biological signals, namely ECG and EEG, which reflect the activity of the heart and brain, respectively. Although deep neural networks are considered the primary way to process and analyze these signals, the very tight energy and computational power constraints in wearable devices are far below the computational, energy, and memory bandwidth demands of DNN models, thereby impeding the deployment of deep learning in many practical wearable services. This paper investigates the feasibility of deploying state-of-the-art DNN models in resource-constrained wearable devices. Notably, we explore the trade-off between accuracy and computational complexity of DNNs when parameter quantization and electrode reduction methods are used. Our investigation centers on several state-of-the-art DNN models designed for EEG signal analysis, specifically for detecting epileptic seizures. Our findings demonstrate that, when applied judiciously, these techniques can significantly reduce the complexity of the DNNs under consideration with minimal adverse effects on accuracy. These results reveal the explicit trade-offs between accuracy and complexity reduction encountered when adapting DNN-based online EEG analysis for wearable devices.

cs.AI

Ultra Low-Power SDM-based Circuit-Switching for Networks-on-Chip

In many modern AI chips and multicore systems-on-chip, embedded applications exhibit predictable inter-core traffic behavior that can be characterized at design time. For such applications, a variety of design-time traffic management and network optimization techniques can be employed to improve NoC power and performance. To exploit this predictability, we propose a novel low-power circuit-switched NoC design. It uses the Spatial Division Multiplexing (SDM) technique to establish circuits, implemented as subsets of NoC wires, for the communication flows of a target application. To further reduce the power profile of SDM, the design incorporates a new router architecture that combines hard-wired switches with conventional programmable crossbars. The architecture is complemented by an algorithm that maps application tasks onto a mesh NoC and assigns an SDM route with adequate bit-width to each circuit built for inter-task communication flows. Compared with a conventional packet-switched NoC, the proposed approach achieves approximately 38% lower NoC power consumption, 19% smaller area, and 12% lower packet latency.

cs.AR

AxLLM: accelerator architecture for large language models with computation reuse capability

Large language models demand massive computational power and memory resources, posing significant challenges for efficient deployment. While quantization has been widely explored to reduce model size and computation, this paper demonstrates an additional benefit: quantization increases parameter locality, creating opportunities for computation reuse. Building on this insight, we propose AxLLM, a hardware accelerator architecture designed for quantized models. Axllm introduces a novel redundancy elimination technique that caches and reuses multiplication results for repeated weight values, substantially reducing redundant operations. The architecture features dual multiply and reuse pipelines, efficiently supporting both base models and LoRA fine-tuned models without altering parameters, retraining, or requiring offline preprocessing. Experimental results show that AxLLM achieves up to 90% reduction in computations, delivering 28% lower energy consumption and a 1.7x speedup over baseline execution. These results highlight Axllm as a scalable and efficient solution for accelerating LLMs on specialized hardware.

cs.AR

A Customized Memory-aware Architecture for Biological Sequence Alignment

Sequence alignment is a fundamental process in computational biology which identifies regions of similarity in biological sequences. With the exponential growth in the volume of data in bioinformatics databases, the time, processing power, and memory bandwidth for comparing a query sequence with the available databases grows proportionally. The sequence alignment algorithms often involve simple arithmetic operations and feature high degrees of inherent fine-grained and coarse-grained parallelism. These features can be potentially exploited by a massive parallel processor, such as a GPU, to increase throughput. In this paper, we show that the excessive memory bandwidth demand of the sequence alignment algorithms prevents exploiting the maximum achievable throughput on conventional parallel machines. We then propose a memory-aware architecture to reduce the bandwidth demand of the sequence alignment algorithms, effectively pushing the memory wall to extract higher throughput. The design is integrated at the logic layer of an emerging 3D DRAM as a processing-in-memory architecture to further increase the available bandwidth. The experimental results show that the proposed architecture results in up to 2.4x speedup over a GPU-based design. Moreover, by moving the computation closer to the memory, power consumption is reduced by 37%, on average.

cs.AR

NU-Class Net: A Novel Approach for Video Quality Enhancement

Video content has experienced a surge in popularity, asserting its dominance over internet traffic and Internet of Things (IoT) networks. Video compression has long been regarded as the primary means of efficiently managing the substantial multimedia traffic generated by video-capturing devices. Nevertheless, video compression algorithms entail significant computational demands in order to achieve substantial compression ratios. This complexity presents a formidable challenge when implementing efficient video coding standards in resource-constrained embedded systems, such as IoT edge node cameras. To tackle this challenge, this paper introduces NU-Class Net, an innovative deep-learning model designed to mitigate compression artifacts stemming from lossy compression codecs. This enhancement significantly elevates the perceptible quality of low-bit-rate videos. By employing the NU-Class Net, the video encoder within the video-capturing node can reduce output quality, thereby generating low-bit-rate videos and effectively curtailing both computation and bandwidth requirements at the edge. On the decoder side, which is typically less encumbered by resource limitations, NU-Class Net is applied after the video decoder to compensate for artifacts and approximate the quality of the original video. Experimental results affirm the efficacy of the proposed model in enhancing the perceptible quality of videos, especially those streamed at low bit rates.

cs.CV

NOM: Network-On-Memory for Inter-Bank Data Transfer in Highly-Banked Memories

Data copy is a widely-used memory operation in many programs and operating system services. In conventional computers, data copy is often carried out by two separate read and write transactions that pass data back and forth between the DRAM chip and the processor chip. Some prior mechanisms propose to avoid this unnecessary data movement by using the shared internal bus in the DRAM chip to directly copy data within the DRAM chip (e.g., between two DRAM banks). While these methods exhibit superior performance compared to conventional techniques, data copy across different DRAM banks is still greatly slower than data copy within the same DRAM bank. Hence, these techniques have limited benefit for the emerging 3D-stacked memories (e.g., HMC and HBM) that contain hundreds of DRAM banks across multiple memory controllers. In this paper, we present Network-on-Memory (NoM), a lightweight inter-bank data communication scheme that enables direct data copy across both memory banks of a 3D-stacked memory. NoM adopts a TDM-based circuit-switching design, where circuit setup is done by the memory controller. Compared to state-of-the-art approaches, NoM enables both fast data copy between multiple DRAM banks and concurrent data transfer operations. Our evaluation shows that NoM improves the performance of data-intensive workloads by 3.8X and 75%, on average, compared to the baseline conventional 3D-stacked DRAM architecture and state-of-the-art techniques, respectively.

cs.AR