arXiv AI By Alexis Maras, Panagiotis Chaidos, Georgios Alexandris, Dimitrios Soudris, Sotirios Xydis

Adapting DNNs to Embrace Voltage Scaling Induced Errors via Accumulation-Aware Quantization

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The paper proposes a hardware-software co-design to mitigate voltage scaling errors in deep neural networks. It introduces Accumulation-Aware Training that constrains weight distributions, combines mixed-precision quantization with pruning, and applies selective MSB-masking, clock-gating, and layer-wise dynamic frequency scaling. Experiments on a 2nm node show 39% energy savings and 23% energy-delay product improvement at low voltage, with less than 1% accuracy loss.

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