Deep neural networks (DNN) have shown superior performance in a variety of tasks. As they rapidly evolve, their escalating computation and memory demands make it challenging to deploy them on resource-constrained edge devices. Though extensive efficient accelerator designs, from traditional electronics to emerging photonics, have been successfully demonstrated, they are still bottlenecked by expensive memory accesses due to tremendous gaps between the bandwidth/power/latency of electrical memory and computing cores. Previous solutions fail to fully-leverage the ultra-fast computational speed of emerging DNN accelerators to break through the critical memory bound. In this work, we propose a general and unified framework to trade expensive memory transactions with ultra-fast on-chip computations, directly translating to performance improvement. We are the first to jointly explore the intrinsic correlations and bit-level redundancy within DNN kernels and propose a multi-level in situ generation mechanism with mixed-precision bases to achieve on-the-fly recovery of high-resolution parameters with minimum hardware overhead. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our proposed joint method can boost the memory efficiency by 10-20x with comparable accuracy over four state-of-the-art designs, when benchmarked on ResNet-18/DenseNet-121/MobileNetV2/V3 with various tasks.

本研究提出了一种通用和统一的框架，通过多级现场生成机制和混合精度基准，实现了高分辨率参数的即时恢复，从而以最小的硬件开销直接将昂贵的内存交易转换为超快的芯片内计算，提高了内存效率10-20倍。

通过多级原位生成实现内存高效神经网络