arXiv Machine Learning

Pruning Binarized Neural Networks: A Dedicated Framework and Globally Weighted Algorithms

The paper presents a PyTorch-based framework for designing and optimizing binarized neural networks, incorporating freezing and pruning mechanisms. It introduces a novel pruning method that uses a global weighting scheme to assess parameter importance across abstraction levels, achieving a 70% pruning rate on VGG11 without sacrificing accuracy—outperforming existing binarized pruning results of 41%. The framework facilitates rapid, reproducible evaluation and prototyping of state‑of‑the‑art binarized network techniques.

arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 17

FAME: An FPGA-Based Platform for Approximate Multipliers Evaluation with Pattern-Guided DNN Retraining

FAME is an FPGA-based platform that evaluates approximate multipliers directly in hardware, eliminating slow CPU/GPU LUT emulation and reducing evaluation time for DNN inference. It also introduces a pattern-guided retraining method that uses multiplier-specific patterns to recover accuracy losses. Experiments on ResNet‑18 and MobileNetV2 over ImageNet show up to 3.47× faster multiplier evaluation and a 65.5% accuracy improvement over prior retraining approaches.

By Rappy Saha, Nima Amirafshar, Jude Haris, Nima Taherinejad, Jos\'e Cano
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 7

Deep Microcompression: Structured Pruning and Bit-packed Quantization for Microcontrollers

Deep Microcompression (DMC) is a hardware‑aware pipeline that combines structured pruning, quantization‑aware training, and fixed‑length bit‑packing to enable deep learning inference on bare‑metal microcontrollers. The method achieves a 55.8× weight compression on LeNet‑5 while maintaining 98.77% accuracy, and produces a dependency‑free C library with deterministic latency. On the RP2040 Cortex‑M0+ microcontroller, DMC cuts binary size threefold compared to TensorFlow Lite while matching its accuracy, and it is the first documented deployment of a standard CNN on the 2 KB SRAM ATmega328P.

By Opegbemi Matthias Busoye, Tolulope Matthew Busoye, Eghonghon-aye Eigbe
arXiv Machine Learning
Jul 14

Towards Efficient Convolutional Neural Network for Embedded Hardware via Multi-Dimensional Pruning

arXiv:2607. 11473v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: In this paper, we propose TECO, a multi-dimensional pruning framework to collaboratively prune the three dimensions (depth, width, and resolution) of convolutional neural networks (CNNs) for better execution efficiency on embedded hardware.

By Hao Kong, Di Liu, Xiangzhong Luo, Shuo Huai, Ravi Subramaniam, Christian Makaya, Qian Lin, Weichen Liu