arXiv Machine Learning

FlexViT: A Flexible FPGA-based Accelerator for Edge Vision Transformers

arXiv:2606. 31938v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Deploying Vision Transformer (ViT) models on edge platforms remains challenging due to their high computational demands and the architectural heterogeneity of modern hybrid ViT models, which incorporate both fully connected and convolutional layers.

arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 7

Evolving Layer-Specific Scalar Functions for Hardware-Aware Transformer Adaptation

The paper introduces a hardware‑aware framework that uses genetic programming to evolve layer‑specific scalar functions for Vision Transformers, replacing traditional LayerNorm with efficient, heterogeneous approximations. By applying a post‑training re‑alignment strategy, the method eliminates the need for full model retraining while achieving 90‑93% variance capture and recovering over 84% of ImageNet‑1K Top‑1 accuracy for ViT‑B and ViT‑L. The resulting architecture removes the global reduction bottleneck, reducing arithmetic complexity and off‑chip memory traffic, thereby enabling efficient deployment of ViTs on edge accelerators.

By Kieran Carrigg, Sigur de Vries, Amirhossein Sadough, Marcel van Gerven
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
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Jun 24

Energy-Efficient CNN Acceleration with MSDF Digit-Serial Arithmetic on FPGA

This paper presents an energy-efficient hardware acceleration of the convolutional layers in the U-Net architecture for image segmentation, implemented on FPGA. While digit-serial arithmetic, particularly most-significant-digit-first (MSDF) techniques, offers a compact hardware footprint, it suffers from initial latency before producing the first output digit.

arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 13

Achieving Near-Zero-Overhead Multi-Model Hierarchical Classification in Real-Time Detection Pipelines

arXiv:2608. 11770v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Edge-deployed vision systems in target recognition, surveillance, autonomous vehicles, and drone domains require hierarchical inference pipelines where a detection model identifies objects of interest and downstream classifiers provide fine-grained attribute analysis.

By Vaishnav Raju
arXiv AI
Sep 23

SPECTRA: Adaptive Execution of Speculative Decoding on a Runtime-Reconfigurable Tiled Architecture

The paper introduces SPECTRA, a runtime‑reconfigurable tiled architecture designed to accelerate speculative decoding for large language models on edge devices. SPECTRA adapts its compute engine within each tile between systolic GEMM execution and vector‑lane GEMV execution, while dynamically adjusting tile count, kernel partitioning, and communication patterns across tiles. Experiments on a 20‑tile FPGA prototype demonstrate up to a 2.09× speedup from tile‑level reconfiguration and an additional 1.25× improvement from system‑level adaptability compared to fixed designs.

By Gabriele Tombesi, William Baisi, Je Yang, Elisavet Lydia Alvanaki, Kevin Lee, Michael Lippe, Biruk Seyoum, Luca P. Carloni