The growing demand for sparse tensor algebra (SpTA) in machine learning and big data has driven the development of various sparse tensor accelerators. However, most existing manually designed accelerators are limited to specific scenarios, and it’s time-consuming and challenging to adjust a large number of design factors when scenarios change. Therefore, automating the design of SpTA accelerators is crucial. Nevertheless, previous works focus solely on eithermapping(i.e., tiling communication and computation in space and time) orsparse strategy(i.e., bypassing zero elements for efficiency), leading to suboptimal designs due to the lack of consideration of both. A unified framework that jointly optimizes both is urgently needed. However, integrating mapping and sparse strategies leads to a combinatorial explosion in the design space(e.g., as large asO(1041) for the workloadP32×64×Q64×48=Z32×48). This vast search space renders most conventional optimization methods (e.g., particle swarm optimization, reinforcement learning and Monte Carlo tree search) inefficient. To address this challenge, we propose an evolution strategy-based sparse tensor accelerator optimization framework, called SparseMap. SparseMap constructing a more essential-factor design space with the consideration of both mapping and sparse strategy. We introduce a series of enhancements to genetic encoding and evolutionary operators, enabling SparseMap to efficiently explore the vast and diverse design space. We quantitatively compare SparseMap with prior works and classical optimization methods, demonstrating that SparseMap consistently finds superior solutions.

Training deep neural networks (DNNs) on edge devices faces challenges due to the large-scale datasets required, which are costly for edge devices, especially in large language model (LLM) tasks. To address this, a DNN-free method called Near-Memory Sampling (NMS) has been introduced. NMS reduces dimensionality and performs exemplar sampling in the reduced space, avoiding architectural bias and improving generalization. However, NMS has two limitations: 1) The mismatch between the search method and the non-monotonic property of the perplexity error function leads to the emergence of outliers; 2) Key parameter (i.e., target perplexity) is selected empirically, introducing arbitrariness and leading to uneven sampling. These two issues lead torepresentative biasof exemplars, resulting in degraded accuracy. To overcome these, we propose AdapSNE, which integrates the Fireworks Algorithm (FWA) for efficient non-monotonic search to avoid outliers and uses entropy-guided optimization for uniform sampling, ensuring representative training samples. To reduce the cost of iterative computations, we design an accelerator with custom dataflow and time-multiplexing mechanisms. Experimental results show that AdapSNE outperforms state-of-the-art methods, including both DNN-based (DQAS) and DNN-free (NMS) approaches, across small-scale image datasets, large-scale datasets, and the MMLU benchmark for LLM tasks.