As the technology industry is moving towards implementing tasks such as natural language processing, path planning, image classification, and more on smaller edge computing devices, the demand for more efficient implementations of algorithms and hardware accelerators has become a significant area of research. In recent years, several edge deep learning hardware accelerators have been released that specifically focus on reducing the power and area consumed by deep neural networks (DNNs). On the other hand, spiking neural networks (SNNs) which operate on discrete time-series data, have been shown to achieve substantial power reductions over even the aforementioned edge DNN accelerators when deployed on specialized neuromorphic event-based/asynchronous hardware. While neuromorphic hardware has demonstrated great potential for accelerating deep learning tasks at the edge, the current space of algorithms and hardware is limited and still in rather early development. Thus, many hybrid approaches have been proposed which aim to convert pre-trained DNNs into SNNs. In this work, we provide a general guide to converting pre-trained DNNs into SNNs while also presenting techniques to improve the deployment of converted SNNs on neuromorphic hardware with respect to latency, power, and energy. Our experimental results show that when compared against the Intel Neural Compute Stick 2, Intel's neuromorphic processor, Loihi, consumes up to 27x less power and 5x less energy in the tested image classification tasks by using our SNN improvement techniques.

本文提供了一种将预先训练的深度神经网络(DNNs) 转换成脉冲神经网络(SNNs)的通用指南，并介绍了一些在神经形态硬件上部署转换后的 SNNs 的技术，可显著改进其延迟，功耗和能耗。实验结果表明，与Intel Neural Compute Stick 2相比，使用我们的SNN改进技术， Intel 的神经形态处理器Loihi 在测试的图像分类任务中功耗降低了最多27倍，能耗降低了最多5倍。

神经形态硬件上机器学习工作量的高效部署