An FPGA-based bit-level weight sparsity and mixed-bit accelerator for neural networks☆

Bit-level weight sparsity and mixed-bit quantization are regarded as effective methods to improve the computing efficiency of convolutional neural network (CNN) accelerators. However, irregular sparse matrices will greatly increase the index overhead and hardware resource consumption. Moreover, bit-serial computing (BSC) is usually adopted to implement bit-level weight sparsity on accelerators, and the traditional BSC leads to uneven utilization of DSP and LUT resources on the FPGA platform, thereby limiting the improvement of the overall performance of the accelerator. Therefore, in this work, we present an accelerator designed for bit-level weight sparsity and mixed-bit quantization. We first introduce a non-linear quantization algorithm named bit-level sparsity learned quantizer (BSLQ), which can maintain high accuracy during mixed quantization and guide the accelerator to complete bit-level weight sparse computations using DSP. Based on this algorithm, we implement the multi-channel bit-level sparsity (MCBS) method to mitigate irregularities and reduce the index count associated with bit level sparsity. Finally, we propose a sparse weight arbitrary basis scratch pad (SWAB SPad) method that enables retrieval of compressed weights without fetching activations, which can save 30.52% of LUTs and 64.02% of FFs. Experimental results demonstrate that when quantizing ResNet50 and VGG16 using 4/8 bits, our approach achieves accuracy that is comparable to or even better than 32-bit (75.98% and 73.70% for the two models). Compared to the state-of-the-art FPGA-based accelerators, this accelerator achieves up to 5.36 times DSP efficiency improvement and provides 8.87 times energy efficiency improvement.