It is difficult to employ transformer models for computer vision in mobile devices due to their memory- and computation-intensive properties. Accordingly, there is ongoing research on various methods for compressing transformer models, such as pruning. However, general computing platforms such as central processing units (CPUs) and graphics processing units (GPUs) are not energy-efficient to accelerate the pruned model due to their structured sparsity. This paper proposes a low-power accelerator for transformers with various sizes of structured sparsity induced by pruning with different granularity. In this study, we can accelerate a transformer that has been pruned in a head-wise, line-wise, or block-wise manner. We developed a head scheduling algorithm to support head-wise skip operations and resolve the processing engine (PE) load imbalance problem caused by different number of operations in one head. Moreover, we implemented a sparse general matrix-to-matrix multiplication (sparse GEMM) module that supports line-wise and block-wise skipping. As a result, when compared with a mobile GPU and mobile CPU respectively, our proposed accelerator achieved$6.1\times$and$13.6\times$improvements in energy efficiency for the detection transformer (DETR) model and achieved approximately$2.6\times$and$7.9\times$improvements in the energy efficiency on average for the vision transformer (ViT) models.

Numerous network compression methods have been proposed to deploy deep neural networks in a resource-constrained embedded system. Among them, block-circulant matrix (BCM) compression is one of the promising hardware-friendly methods for both acceleration and compression. However, it has several limitations; (i) limited representation due to the structural characteristic of circulant matrix, (ii) limitation of the compression parameter, (iii) need to specialize the dataflow for BCM-compressed network accelerators. In this paper, rank-enhanced and highly-pruned block-circulant matrices compression (RP-BCM) framework is proposed to overcome these limitations. RP-BCM comprises two stages: Hadamard-BCM and BCM-wise pruning. Moreover, a dedicated skip scheme is introduced to processing element design for exploiting high-parallelism with BCM-wise sparsity. Furthermore, we propose specialized dataflow for a BCM-compressed network on a resource-constrained FPGA. As a result, the proposed method achieves parameter reduction and FLOPs reduction for ResNet-50 in ImageNet by 92.4% and 77.3%, respectively. Moreover, the proposed hardware design achieves$3.1\times$improvement in energy efficiency on the Xilinx PYNQ-Z2 FPGA board for ResNet-18 on ImageNet compared to the GPU.