Leveraging sparsity optimizes storage and computation for resource-constrained devices in Deep Learning Neural Networks (DNNs). While neural networks naturally incorporate sparsity through operations like ReLU and quantization, diverse sparsity levels (0.2% to 99%) pose challenges for the design of computational units. In this paper, we provide an energy-efficient GEMM accelerator named FullSparse which is designed for diverse applications, accommodating varying sparsity levels in matrix multiplication (0.2% to 99%). This paper introduces three features for nuanced sparsity support: multi-sparsity control, predictive result sparsity, and a multi-sparsity-compatible PE array. Experimental evaluations affirm that our implementation while ensuring adaptability to sparsity, exhibits superior computational power comparable to the existing designs.

Sparse matrix multiplication is a critical operation in deep learning. However, matrix sparsity leads to irregular data flow, which would degrade the efficiency of matrix multiplication. Traditional accelerators, equipped with additional hardware units to address this issue, often experience the issue of low hardware utilization. Furthermore, N : M structured sparsity and corresponding hardware architectures face challenges such as accuracy degradation, limited flexibility, and restricted applicability. In this paper, we propose a Flexible Sparse Matrix Multiplication Accelerator (FSMM), which can improve the efficiency of sparse matrix multiplication through both algorithmic-level and hardware-level optimizations. At the algorithmic level, we propose the matrix-matrix multiplication with block-level outer production and fine-grained matrix reordering algorithm. The algorithm balances the sparsity of each column of a matrix block, which improves matrix compression, balances the load, and speeds up computation. This algorithm reduces storage by 8.2% ~ 85.9%. At the hardware-level, we introduce a flexible architecture for matrix multiplication. It selects the most suitable data path to complete matrix multiplication based on the sparsity of the reordered matrix. FSMM achieves a speedup of 1.90× ~ 16.18× over Systolic Array and 1.70× ~ 2.87× over the existing TSTC approach.

Vision Language Models (VLMs) demonstrate remarkable proficiency in addressing a wide array of visual questions, which requires strong perception and reasoning faculties. Assessing these two competencies independently is crucial for model refinement, despite the inherent difficulty due to the intertwined nature of seeing and reasoning in existing VLMs. To tackle this issue, we present Prism, an innovative framework designed to disentangle the perception and reasoning processes involved in visual question solving. Prism comprises two distinct stages: a perception stage that utilizes a VLM to extract and articulate visual information in textual form, and a reasoning stage that formulates responses based on the extracted visual information using a Large Language Model (LLM). This modular design enables the systematic comparison and assessment of both proprietary and open-source VLM for their perception and reasoning strengths. Our analytical framework provides several valuable insights, underscoring Prism's potential as a cost-effective solution for vision-language tasks. By combining a streamlined VLM focused on perception with a powerful LLM tailored for reasoning, Prism achieves superior results in general vision-language tasks while substantially cutting down on training and operational expenses. Quantitative evaluations show that Prism, when configured with a vanilla 2B LLaVA and freely accessible GPT-3.5, delivers performance on par with VLMs $10 \times$ larger on the rigorous multimodal benchmark MMStar.