A Hardware-Friendly Algorithm for Scalable Training and Deployment of Dimensionality Reduction Models on FPGA

Mahdi Nazemi1, Amir Erfan Eshratifar2, Massoud Pedram1
1USC, 2University of Southern California


Abstract

With ever-increasing application of machine learning models in various domains such as image classification, speech recognition and synthesis, and health care, designing efficient hardware for these models has gained a lot of popularity. While the majority of researches in this area focus on efficient deployment of machine learning models (a.k.a inference), this work concentrates on challenges of training these models in hardware. In particular, this paper presents a high-performance, scalable, reconfigurable solution for both training and deployment of different dimensionality reduction models in hardware by introducing a hardware-friendly algorithm. Compared to state-of-the-art implementations, our proposed algorithm and its hardware realization decrease resource consumption by a factor of two without any degradation in accuracy.