Tao Liu 0023

dblp:43/656-23 · DBLP profile ↗
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26ranked-venue papers
8as first author
7since 2021 · last 2025
0000-0002-7535-444XORCID · conflict

Domains — the database's venue-derived domains; a paper can count in several

Systems, architecture and hardware · 16 · 6 first-author · 3 since 2021Artificial intelligence and machine learning · 5 · 3 since 2021Graphics, computer vision, multimedia, augmented reality and games · 5 · 1 since 2021Security and privacy · 2 · 2 first-authorApplied, interdisciplinary, general and emerging computing · 2Computer networks · 1 · 1 since 2021Software engineering, systems software and programming languages · 1 · 1 since 2021
YearPublicationVenuePosition
2025 Frequency-Biased Synergistic Design for Image Compression and Compensation
abstract
Compression artifacts removal (CAR), an effective post-processing method to reduce compression distortion in edge-side codecs, demonstrates remarkable results by utilizing convolutional neural networks (CNNs) on high computational power cloud side. Traditional image compression reduces redundancy in the frequency domain, and we observed that CNNs also exhibit a bias in frequency domain when handling compression distortions. However, no prior research leverages this frequency bias to design compression methods tailored to CAR CNNs, or vice versa. In this paper, we present a synergistic design that bridges the gap between image compression and learnable compensation for CAR. Our investigation reveals that different compensation networks have varying effects on low and high-frequencies. Building upon these insights, we propose a pioneering redesign of the quantization process, a fundamental component in lossy image compression, to more effectively compress low-frequency information. Additionally, we devise a novel compensation framework that applies different neural networks for reconstructing different frequencies, incorporating a basis attention block to prioritize intentionally dropped low-frequency information, thereby enhancing the overall compensation. We instantiate two compensation networks based on this synergistic design and conduct extensive experiments on three image compression standards, demonstrating that our approach significantly reduces bitrate consumption while delivering high perceptual quality.
Qi Zheng 0004, Zihao Liu 0015, Yilian Zhong, Peiye Liu, Tao Liu 0023, Shusong Xu, Yanheng Lu, Sicheng Li 0001, Dimin Niu, Yibo Fan
CVPR6
2024 Auto-ISP: An Efficient Real-Time Automatic Hyperparameter Optimization Framework for ISP Hardware System
abstract
Image Signal Processor (ISP) is widely used in intelligent edge devices across various scenarios. The intricate and time-consuming tuning process demands substantial expertise. Current AI-based auto-tuning operates discretely offline, relying on predefined scenes with human intervention, leading to inconvenient manipulation, with potentially fatal impacts on downstream tasks in unforeseen scenes. We propose a real-time automatic hyperparameter optimization ISP hardware system to address real-world scenarios. Our design features a tri-step framework and a hardware accelerator, demonstrating superior performance in human and computer vision tasks, even in real-time unforeseen scenes. Experiments showcase its practicality, achieving 1080P@75FPS/240FPS in FPGA/ASIC, respectively.
Zihao Liu 0015, Ruoxi Zhu, Qi Zheng 0004, Zhijian Hao, Tao Liu 0023, Jun Tao 0001, Yibo Fan
DAC7
2024 Intelligent Networking for Energy Harvesting Powered IoT Systems
abstract
As the next-generation battery substitute for IoT system, energy harvesting (EH) technology revolutionizes the IoT industry with environmental friendliness, ubiquitous accessibility, and sustainability, which enables various self-sustaining IoT applications. However, due to the weak and intermittent nature of EH power, the performance of EH-powered IoT systems as well as its collaborative routing mechanism can severely deteriorate, rendering unpleasant data package loss during each power failure. Such a phenomenon makes conventional routing policies and energy allocation strategies impractical. Given the complexity of the problem, reinforcement learning (RL) appears to be one of the most promising and applicable methods to address this challenge. Nevertheless, although the energy allocation and routing policy are jointly optimized by the RL method, due to the energy restriction of EH devices, the inappropriate configuration of multi-hop network topology severely degrades the data collection performance. Therefore, this article first conducts a thorough mathematical discussion and develops the topology design and validation algorithm under energy harvesting scenarios. Then, this article develops DeepIoTRouting , a distributed and scalable deep reinforcement learning (DRL)-based approach, to address the routing and energy allocation jointly for the energy harvesting powered distributed IoT system. The experimental results show that with topology optimization, DeepIoTRouting achieves at least 38.71% improvement on the amount of data delivery to sink in a 20-device IoT network, which significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods.
Tao Liu 0023, Jeff Zhang 0001, Mehdi Sookhak, Mimi Xie
ACM Trans. Sens. Networks3
2023 SpENCNN: Orchestrating Encoding and Sparsity for Fast Homomorphically Encrypted Neural Network Inference
abstract
Homomorphic Encryption (HE) is a promising technology to protect clients’ data privacy for Machine Learning as a Service (MLaaS) on public clouds. However, HE operations can be orders of magnitude slower than their counterparts for plaintexts and thus result in prohibitively high inference latency, seriously hindering the practicality of HE. In this paper, we propose a HE-based fast neural network (NN) inference framework–SpENCNN built upon the co-design of HE operation-aware model sparsity and the single-instruction-multiple-data (SIMD)-friendly data packing, to improve NN inference latency. In particular, we first develop an encryption-aware HE-group convolution technique that can partition channels among different groups based on the data size and ciphertext size, and then encode them into the same ciphertext by novel group-interleaved encoding, so as to dramatically reduce the number of bottlenecked operations in HE convolution. We further tailor a HE-friendly sub-block weight pruning to reduce the costly HE-based convolution operation. Our experiments show that SpENCNN can achieve overall speedups of 8.37$\times$, 12.11$\times$, 19.26$\times$, and 1.87$\times$ for LeNet, VGG-5, HEFNet, and ResNet-20 respectively, with negligible accuracy loss. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/ranran0523/SPECNN.
Xinwei Luo, Tao Liu 0023, Gang Quan, Xiaolin Xu 0001, Caiwen Ding, Wujie Wen
ICML4
2023 Penguin: Parallel-Packed Homomorphic Encryption for Fast Graph Convolutional Network Inference
abstract
The marriage of Graph Convolutional Network (GCN) and Homomorphic Encryption (HE) enables the inference of graph data on the cloud with significantly enhanced client data privacy. However, the tremendous computation and memory overhead associated with HE operations challenges the practicality of HE-based GCN inference. GCN inference involves a sequence of expensive matrix-matrix multiplications, and we observe that directly applying the state-of-the-art HE-based secure matrix-matrix multiplication solutions to accelerate HE-GCN inference is far less efficient as it does not exploit the unique aggregation mechanism of two-dimension graph node-features in GCN layer computation. As a result, in this paper, we propose a novel HE-based ciphertext packing technique, i.e., Penguin, that can take advantage of the unique computation pattern during the HE-GCN inference to significantly reduce the computation and memory overhead associated with HE operations. Specifically, Penguin employs (i) an effective two-dimension parallel packing technique for feature ciphertext with optimal graph node partitioning and graph feature interleaving, and (ii) an interleaved assembly technique that can effectively make use of the blank slots to merge ciphertexts after feature reduction and significantly reduce the costly rotation operation. We provide theoretical analysis and experimental validation to demonstrate the speedup achieved by Penguin in accelerating GCN inference using popular GCN models and datasets. Our results show that Penguin can achieve up to $\sim10\times$ speedup and around $\sim79$% reduction in computational memory overhead, significantly outperforming state-of-the-art solutions. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work that can ensure the protection of both graph structure and features when accelerating HE-GCN inference on encrypted data. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/ranran0523/Penguin.
Nuo Xu 0013, Tao Liu 0023, Gang Quan, Wujie Wen
NeurIPS3
2022 Energy Harvesting Aware Multi-Hop Routing Policy in Distributed IoT System Based on Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning
abstract
Energy harvesting technologies offer a promising solution to sustainably power an ever-growing number of Internet of Things (IoT) devices. However, due to the weak and transient natures of energy harvesting, IoT devices have to work intermittently rendering conventional routing policies and energy allocation strategies impractical. To this end, this paper, for the very first time, developed a distributed multi-agent reinforcement algorithm known as global actor-critic policy (GAP) to address the problem of routing policy and energy allocation together for the energy harvesting powered IoT system. At the training stage, each IoT device is treated as an agent and one universal model is trained for all agents to save computing resources. At the inference stage, packet delivery rate can be maximized. The experimental results show that the proposed GAP algorithm achieves ~ 1.28× and ~ 1.24× data transmission rate than that of the Q-table and ESDSRAA algorithm, respectively.
Tao Liu 0023, Mimi Xie, Longzhuang Li, Dulal C. Kar
ASP-DAC2
2022 M2M-Routing: Environmental Adaptive Multi-agent Reinforcement Learning based Multi-hop Routing Policy for Self-Powered IoT Systems
abstract
Energy harvesting (EH) technologies facilitate the trending proliferation of IoT devices with sustainable power supplies. However, the intrinsic weak and unstable nature of EH results in frequent and unpredictable power interruptions in EH IoT devices, which further causes unpleasant packet loss or reconnection failures in IoT network. Therefore, conventional routing and energy allocation methods are inefficient in the EH environments. The complexity of the EH environment caused a stumbling block to an intelligent routing policy and energy allocation. To address the problems, this work proposes an environment adaptive Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL)-based multi-hop routing policy, M2M-Routing, to jointly optimize energy allocation and routing policy and mitigate these challenges through leveraging the offline computation resources. We prepare multi-models for the complex energy harvesting environment offline. By searching a historically similar power trace to identify the model ID, the prepared DRL model is selected to manage energy allocation and routing policy on the query power traces. Simulation results indicate that M2M-Routing improves the amount of data delivery by ~ 3 × to ~ 4 × compared with baselines.
Jeff Zhang 0001, Mimi Xie, Tao Liu 0023, Wenlu Wang
DATE4
2020 StegoNet: Turn Deep Neural Network into a Stegomalware
abstract
Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) are now presenting human-level performance on many real-world applications, and DNN-based intelligent services are becoming more and more popular across all aspects of our lives. Unfortunately, the ever-increasing DNN service implies a dangerous feature which has not yet been well studied–allowing the marriage of existing malware and DNN model for any pre-defined malicious purpose. In this paper, we comprehensively investigate how to turn DNN into a new breed evasive self-contained stegomalware, namely StegoNet, using model parameter as a novel payload injection channel, with no service quality degradation (i.e. accuracy) and the triggering event connected to the physical world by specified DNN inputs. A series of payload injection techniques which take advantage of a variety of unique neural network natures like complex structure, high error resilience capability and huge parameter size, are developed for both uncompressed models (with model redundancy) and deeply compressed models tailored for resource-limited devices (no model redundancy), including LSB substitution, resilience training, value mapping, and sign-mapping. We also proposed a set of triggering techniques like logits trigger, rank trigger and fine-tuned rank trigger to trigger StegoNet by specific physical events under realistic environment variations. We implement the StegoNet prototype on Nvidia Jetson TX2 testbed. Extensive experimental results and discussions on the evasiveness, integrity of proposed payload injection techniques, and the reliability and sensitivity of the triggering techniques, well demonstrate the feasibility and practicality of StegoNet.
Tao Liu 0023, Zihao Liu 0015, Qi Liu 0017, Wujie Wen, Wenyao Xu, Ming Li 0003
ACSAC1
2020 Tiny but Accurate: A Pruned, Quantized and Optimized Memristor Crossbar Framework for Ultra Efficient DNN Implementation
abstract
The memristor crossbar array has emerged as an intrinsically suitable matrix computation and low-power acceleration framework for DNN applications. Many techniques such as memristor-based weight pruning and memristor-based quantization have been studied. However, the high accuracy solution for the above techniques is still waiting for unraveling. In this paper, we propose a memristor-based DNN framework which combines both structured weight pruning and quantization by incorporating ADMM algorithm for better pruning and quantization performance. We also discover the non-optimality of the ADMM solution in weight pruning and the unused data path in a structured pruned model. We design a software-hardware co-optimization framework which contains the first proposed Network Purification and Unused Path Removal algorithms targeting on post-processing a structured pruned model after ADMM steps. By taking memristor hardware constraints into our whole framework, we achieve extreme high compression rate with minimum accuracy loss. For quantizing structured pruned model, our framework achieves nearly no accuracy loss after quantizing weights to 8-bit memristor weight representation. We share our models at anonymous link https://bit.ly/2VnMUy0.
Geng Yuan, Sheng Lin 0001, Caiwen Ding, Fuxun Yu, Tao Liu 0023, Wujie Wen, Xiang Chen 0010, Yanzhi Wang 0001
ASP-DAC6
2020 Monitoring the Health of Emerging Neural Network Accelerators with Cost-effective Concurrent Test
abstract
ReRAM-based neural network accelerator is a promising solution to handle the memory-and computation-intensive deep learning workloads. However, it suffers from unique device errors. These errors can accumulate to massive levels during the run time and cause significant accuracy drop. It is crucial to obtain its fault status in real-time before any proper repair mechanism can be applied. However, calibrating such statistical information is non-trivial because of the need of a large number of test patterns, long test time, and high test coverage considering that complex errors may appear in million-to-billion weight parameters. In this paper, we leverage the concept of comer data that can significantly confuse the decision making of neural network model, as well as the training algorithm, to generate only a small set of test patterns that is tuned to be sensitive to different levels of error accumulation and accuracy loss. Experimental results show that our method can quickly and correctly report the fault status of a running accelerator, outperforming existing solutions in both detection efficiency and cost
Qi Liu 0017, Tao Liu 0023, Zihao Liu 0015, Wujie Wen, Chengmo Yang
DAC2
2020 Stealing Your Data from Compressed Machine Learning Models
abstract
Machine learning models have been widely deployed in many real-world tasks. When a non-expert data holder wants to use a third-party machine learning service for model training, it is critical to preserve the confidentiality of the training data. In this paper, we for the first time explore the potential privacy leakage in a scenario that a malicious ML provider offers data holder customized training code including model compression which is essential in practical deployment The provider is unable to access the training process hosted by the secured third party, but could inquire models when they are released in public. As a result, adversary can extract sensitive training data with high quality even from these deeply compressed models that are tailored for resource-limited devices. Our investigation shows that existing compressions like quantization, can serve as a defense against such an attack, by degrading the model accuracy and memorized data quality simultaneously. To overcome this defense, we take an initial attempt to design a simple but stealthy quantized correlation encoding attack flow from an adversary perspective. Three integrated components-data pre-processing, layer-wise data-weight correlation regularization, data-aware quantization, are developed accordingly. Extensive experimental results show that our framework can preserve the evasiveness and effectiveness of stealing data from compressed models.
Nuo Xu 0013, Qi Liu 0017, Tao Liu 0023, Zihao Liu 0015, Wujie Wen
DAC3
2020 Defending Deep Learning-Based Biomedical Image Segmentation from Adversarial Attacks: A Low-Cost Frequency Refinement Approach
Qi Liu 0017, Tao Liu 0023, Zihao Liu 0015, Sicheng Li 0001, Wujie Wen, Yiyu Shi 0001
MICCAI (4)3
2020 Orchestrating Medical Image Compression and Remote Segmentation Networks
Zihao Liu 0015, Sicheng Li 0001, Yen-Kuang Chen, Tao Liu 0023, Qi Liu 0017, Xiaowei Xu 0004, Yiyu Shi 0001, Wujie Wen
MICCAI (4)4
2020 FPT-spike: a flexible precise-time-dependent single-spike neuromorphic computing architecture
Tao Liu 0023, Gang Quan, Wujie Wen
CCF Trans. High Perform. Comput.1
2019 A system-level perspective to understand the vulnerability of deep learning systems
abstract
Deep neural network (DNN) is nowadays achieving the human-level performance on many machine learning applications like self-driving car, gaming and computer-aided diagnosis. However, recent studies show that such a promising technique has gradually become the major attack target, significantly threatening the safety of machine learning services. On one hand, the adversarial or poisoning attacks incurred by DNN algorithm vulnerabilities can cause the decision misleading with very high confidence. On the other hand, the system-level DNN attacks built upon models, training/inference algorithms and hardware and software in DNN execution, have also emerged for more diversified damages like denial of service, private data stealing. In this paper, we present an overview of such emerging system-level DNN attacks by systematically formulating their attack routines. Several representative cases are selected in our study to summarize the characteristics of system-level DNN attacks. Based on our formulation, we further discuss the challenges and several possible techniques to mitigate such emerging system-level DNN attacks.
Tao Liu 0023, Nuo Xu 0013, Qi Liu 0017, Yanzhi Wang 0001, Wujie Wen
ASP-DAC1
2019 Feature Distillation: DNN-Oriented JPEG Compression Against Adversarial Examples
abstract
Image compression-based approaches for defending against the adversarial-example attacks, which threaten the safety use of deep neural networks (DNN), have been investigated recently. However, prior works mainly rely on directly tuning parameters like compression rate, to blindly reduce image features, thereby lacking guarantee on both defense efficiency (i.e. accuracy of polluted images) and classification accuracy of benign images, after applying defense methods. To overcome these limitations, we propose a JPEG-based defensive compression framework, namely “feature distillation”, to effectively rectify adversarial examples without impacting classification accuracy on benign data. Our framework significantly escalates the defense efficiency with marginal accuracy reduction using a twostep method: First, we maximize malicious features filtering of adversarial input perturbations by developing defensive quantization in frequency domain of JPEG compression or decompression, guided by a semi-analytical method; Second, we suppress the distortions of benign features to restore classification accuracy through a DNN-oriented quantization refine process. Our experimental results show that proposed “feature distillation” can significantly surpass the latest input-transformation based mitigations such as Quilting and TV Minimization in three aspects, including defense efficiency (improve classification accuracy from ∼ 20% to ∼ 90% on adversarial examples), accuracy of benign images after defense (≤ 1% accuracy degradation), and processing time per image (∼ 259× Speedup). Moreover, our solution also can provide the best defense efficiency (∼ 60% accuracy) against the latest BPDA attack with least accuracy reduction (∼ 1%) on benign images among all other input-transformation based defense methods.
Zihao Liu 0015, Qi Liu 0017, Tao Liu 0023, Nuo Xu 0013, Xue Lin 0001, Yanzhi Wang 0001, Wujie Wen
CVPR3
2019 Machine Vision Guided 3D Medical Image Compression for Efficient Transmission and Accurate Segmentation in the Clouds
abstract
Cloud based medical image analysis has become popular recently due to the high computation complexities of various deep neural network (DNN) based frameworks and the increasingly large volume of medical images that need to be processed. It has been demonstrated that for medical images the transmission from local to clouds is much more expensive than the computation in the clouds itself. Towards this, 3D image compression techniques have been widely applied to reduce the data traffic. However, most of the existing image compression techniques are developed around human vision, i.e., they are designed to minimize distortions that can be perceived by human eyes. In this paper, we will use deep learning based medical image segmentation as a vehicle and demonstrate that interestingly, machine and human view the compression quality differently. Medical images compressed with good quality w.r.t. human vision may result in inferior segmentation accuracy. We then design a machine vision oriented 3D image compression framework tailored for segmentation using DNNs. Our method automatically extracts and retains image features that are most important to the segmentation. Comprehensive experiments on widely adopted segmentation frameworks with HVSMR 2016 challenge dataset show that our method can achieve significantly higher segmentation accuracy at the same compression rate, or much better compression rate under the same segmentation accuracy, when compared with the existing JPEG 2000 method. To the best of the authors' knowledge, this is the first machine vision guided medical image compression framework for segmentation in the clouds.
Zihao Liu 0015, Xiaowei Xu 0004, Tao Liu 0023, Qi Liu 0017, Yanzhi Wang 0001, Yiyu Shi 0001, Wujie Wen, Meiping Huang, Haiyun Yuan, Jian Zhuang
CVPR3
2019 A Fault-Tolerant Neural Network Architecture
abstract
New DNN accelerators based on emerging technologies, such as resistive random access memory (ReRAM), are gaining increasing research attention given their potential of "in-situ" data processing. Unfortunately, device-level physical limitations that are unique to these technologies may cause weight disturbance in memory and thus compromising the performance and stability of DNN accelerators. In this work, we propose a novel fault-tolerant neural network architecture to mitigate the weight disturbance problem without involving expensive retraining. Specifically, we propose a novel collaborative logistic classifier to enhance the DNN stability by redesigning the binary classifiers augmented from both traditional error correction output code (ECOC) and modern DNN training algorithm. We also develop an optimized variable-length "decode-free" scheme to further boost the accuracy under fewer number of classifiers. Experimental results on cutting-edge DNN models and complex datasets show that the proposed fault-tolerant neural network architecture can effectively rectify the accuracy degradation against weight disturbance for DNN accelerators with low cost, thus allowing for its deployment in a variety of mainstream DNNs.
Tao Liu 0023, Wujie Wen, Lei Jiang 0001, Yanzhi Wang 0001, Chengmo Yang, Gang Quan
DAC1
2019 Making the Fault-Tolerance of Emerging Neural Network Accelerators Scalable
abstract
Deep neural network (DNN) accelerators built upon emerging technologies, such as memristor, are gaining increasing research attention because of the impressive computing efficiency brought by processing-in-memory. One critical challenge faced by these promising accelerators, however, is their poor reliability: the weight, which is stored as the memristance or resistance value of each device, suffers large uncertainty incurred by unique device physical limitations, e.g. stochastic programming, resistance drift etc., translating into prominent testing accuracy degradation. Non-trivial retraining, weight remapping or redundant cell fixing, are popular approaches to address this issue. However, these solutions have limited scalability since they are more like tedious patch adding or bug fixing after identifying each accelerator-dependent defect map. On the other side, scalable solutions are highly desirable in the envisioned scenario of a neural network trained once in the cloud and deployed to many edge devices with each equipped with an emerging accelerator. In this paper, we discuss the challenge and requirement of the fault-tolerance in these new accelerators. Then we show how to address this problem through a scalable algorithm-hardware codesign method, with a focus on unleashing the algorithmic error-resilience of DNN classifiers, so as to eliminate any expensive defect-map-specific calibration or training-from-scratch.
Tao Liu 0023, Wujie Wen
ICCAD1
2019 Deep-evasion: Turn deep neural network into evasive self-contained cyber-physical malware: poster
abstract
Deep Neural Network (DNN) based intelligent Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) are becoming more and more popular across all aspects of our lives. Unfortunately, such a promising trend implies a dangerous feature that allows code to be mixed with data in DNN models and triggered by a targeted physical object without harming the DNN inference accuracy. In this work, we investigate such an emerging attack, namely "Deep-Evasion", turning DNN into evasive self-contained malware on CPS. We prototype "Deep-Evasion" on Nvidia Jetson TX2 embedded device and demonstrate a Denial-of-Service (DoS) attack as our proof of concept. Experimental results show "Deep-Evasion" is feasible, reliable and scalable on CPS.
Tao Liu 0023, Wujie Wen
WiSec1
2019 Thread Batching for High-performance Energy-efficient GPU Memory Design
abstract
Massive multi-threading in GPU imposes tremendous pressure on memory subsystems. Due to rapid growth in thread-level parallelism of GPU and slowly improved peak memory bandwidth, memory becomes a bottleneck of GPU’s performance and energy efficiency. In this article, we propose an integrated architectural scheme to optimize the memory accesses and therefore boost the performance and energy efficiency of GPU. First, we propose a thread batch enabled memory partitioning (TEMP) to improve GPU memory access parallelism. In particular, TEMP groups multiple thread blocks that share the same set of pages into a thread batch and applies a page coloring mechanism to bound each stream multiprocessor (SM) to the dedicated memory banks. After that, TEMP dispatches the thread batch to an SM to ensure high-parallel memory-access streaming from the different thread blocks. Second, a thread batch-aware scheduling (TBAS) scheme is introduced to improve the GPU memory access locality and to reduce the contention on memory controllers and interconnection networks. Experimental results show that the integration of TEMP and TBAS can achieve up to 10.3% performance improvement and 11.3% DRAM energy reduction across diverse GPU applications. We also evaluate the performance interference of the mixed CPU+GPU workloads when they are run on a heterogeneous system that employs our proposed schemes. Our results show that a simple solution can effectively ensure the efficient execution of both GPU and CPU applications.
Bing Li 0017, Mengjie Mao, Xiaoxiao Liu 0001, Tao Liu 0023, Zihao Liu 0015, Wujie Wen, Yiran Chen 0001, Hai Li 0001
ACM J. Emerg. Technol. Comput. Syst.4
2018 PT-spike: A precise-time-dependent single spike neuromorphic architecture with efficient supervised learning
abstract
One of the most exciting advancements in Artificial Intelligence (AI) over the last decade is the wide adoption of Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs), such as Deep Neural Network (DNN) and Convolutional Neural Network (CNN), in real world applications. However, the underlying massive amounts of computation and storage requirement greatly challenge their applicability in resource-limited platforms like drone, mobile phone and IoT devices etc. The third generation of neural network model-Spiking Neural Network (SNN), inspired by the working mechanism and efficiency of human brain, has emerged as a promising solution for achieving more impressive computing and power efficiency within light-weighted devices (e.g. single chip). However, the relevant research activities have been narrowly carried out on conventional rate-based spiking system designs for fulfilling the practical cognitive tasks, underestimating SNN's energy efficiency, throughput and system flexibility. Although the time-based SNN can be more attractive conceptually, its potentials are not unleashed in realistic applications due to lack of efficient coding and practical learning schemes. In this work, a Precise-Zime-Dependent Single Spike Neuromorphic Architecture, namely “PT-Spike”, is developed to bridge this gap. Three constituent hardware-favorable techniques: precise single-spike temporal encoding, efficient supervised temporal learning and fast asymmetric decoding are proposed accordingly to boost the energy efficiency and data processing capability of the time-based SNN at a more compact neural network model size when executing real cognitive tasks. Simulation results show that “PT-Spike” demonstrates significant improvements in network size, processing efficiency and power consumption with marginal classification accuracy degradation, when compared with the rate-based SNN and ANN under the similar network configuration.
Tao Liu 0023, Lei Jiang 0001, Yier Jin, Gang Quan, Wujie Wen
ASP-DAC1
2018 Security analysis and enhancement of model compressed deep learning systems under adversarial attacks
abstract
Thanks to recent machine learning model innovation and computing hardware advancement, the state-of-the-art of Deep Neural Network (DNN) is presenting human-level performance for many complex intelligent tasks in real-world applications. However, it also introduces ever-increasing security concerns for those intelligent systems. For example, the emerging adversarial attacks indicate that even very small and often imperceptible adversarial input perturbations can easily mislead the cognitive function of deep learning systems (DLS). Existing DNN adversarial studies are narrowly performed on the ideal software-level DNN models with a focus on single uncertainty factor, i.e. input perturbations, however, the impact of DNN model reshaping on adversarial attacks, which is introduced by various hardware-favorable techniques such as hash-based weight compression during modern DNN hardware implementation, has never been discussed. In this work, we for the first time investigate the multi-factor adversarial attack problem in practical model optimized deep learning systems by jointly considering the DNN model-reshaping (e.g. HashNet based deep compression) and the input perturbations. We first augment adversarial example generating method dedicated to the compressed DNN models by incorporating the software-based approaches and mathematical modeled DNN reshaping. We then conduct a comprehensive robustness and vulnerability analysis of deep compressed DNN models under derived adversarial attacks. A defense technique named “gradient inhibition” is further developed to ease the generating of adversarial examples thus to effectively mitigate adversarial attacks towards both software and hardware-oriented DNNs. Simulation results show that “gradient inhibition” can decrease the average success rate of adversarial attacks from 87.99% to 4.77% (from 86.74% to 4.64%) on MNIST (CIFAR-10) benchmark with marginal accuracy degradation across various DNNs.
Qi Liu 0017, Tao Liu 0023, Zihao Liu 0015, Yanzhi Wang 0001, Yier Jin, Wujie Wen
ASP-DAC2
2018 DeepN-JPEG: a deep neural network favorable JPEG-based image compression framework
abstract
As one of most fascinating machine learning techniques, deep neural network (DNN) has demonstrated excellent performance in various intelligent tasks such as image classification. DNN achieves such performance, to a large extent, by performing expensive training over huge volumes of training data. To reduce the data storage and transfer overhead in smart resource-limited Internet-of-Thing (IoT) systems, effective data compression is a "must-have" feature before transferring real-time produced dataset for training or classification. While there have been many well-known image compression approaches (such as JPEG), we for the first time find that a human-visual based image compression approach such as JPEG compression is not an optimized solution for DNN systems, especially with high compression ratios. To this end, we develop an image compression framework tailored for DNN applications, named "DeepN-JPEG", to embrace the nature of deep cascaded information process mechanism of DNN architecture. Extensive experiments, based on "ImageNet" dataset with various state-of-the-art DNNs, show that "DeepN-JPEG" can achieve ∼ 3.5× higher compression rate over the popular JPEG solution while maintaining the same accuracy level for image recognition, demonstrating its great potential of storage and power efficiency in DNN-based smart IoT system design.
Zihao Liu 0015, Tao Liu 0023, Wujie Wen, Lei Jiang 0001, Jie Xu 0001, Yanzhi Wang 0001, Gang Quan
DAC2
2018 TriZone: A Design of MLC STT-RAM Cache for Combined Performance, Energy, and Reliability Optimizations
abstract
Spin-transfer torque random access memory (STT-RAM) is a promising technology for future nonvolatile caches and memories. To increase the storage density, multilevel cell (MLC) technique was recently introduced to STT-RAM designs at the cost of degraded access speed, reliability, and energy efficiency. Existing MLC STT-RAM cache architectures primarily focus on the performance and energy optimizations but ignore the crucial demand for reliability. In this paper, we propose “TriZone”-a holistic design scheme for MLC STT-RAM cache to simultaneously meet the requirements of performance, energy, and reliability. Three cache block configurations, namely hard, soft, and mixed, are constructed with the hard-bit, soft-bit, and both hard-bit and soft-bit of MLC STT-RAM, respectively. By observing the difference of these cache blocks, a nonuniform strength ECC (NUS-ECC) is developed to guarantee the operational reliability of a cache block with a variable decoding delay adapting to the needs of error correction (e.g., the number of the erroneous bits). The whole MLC STT-RAM cache is then partitioned into three regions, each of which is composed of different cache blocks. In order to achieve the best tradeoff among performance, energy, and reliability, we then introduce the dynamic cache partitioning to determine the partition of this tri-way MLC STT-RAM cache according to the runtime characteristic of various applications. Experiment results show that compared with conventional performance-driven MLC STT-RAM cache design with pessimistic ECC, TriZone can improve the system performance and energy by averagely 11.7% (10.0%) and 13.3% (15.7%), respectively, for single-threaded (multiprogram) applications. The additional area overhead associated with NUS-ECC is limited by ~ 3%.
Zihao Liu 0015, Mengjie Mao, Tao Liu 0023, Wujie Wen, Yiran Chen 0001, Hai Li 0001, Danghui Wang, Yukui Pei, Ning Ge 0001
IEEE Trans. Comput. Aided Des. Integr. Circuits Syst.3
2017 MT-spike: A multilayer time-based spiking neuromorphic architecture with temporal error backpropagation
abstract
Modern deep learning enabled artificial neural networks, such as Deep Neural Network (DNN) and Convolutional Neural Network (CNN), have achieved a series of breaking records on a broad spectrum of recognition applications. However, the enormous computation and storage requirements associated with such deep and complex neural network models greatly challenge their implementations on resource-limited platforms. Time-based spiking neural network has recently emerged as a promising solution in Neuromorphic Computing System designs for achieving remarkable computing and power efficiency within a single chip. However, the relevant research activities have been narrowly concentrated on the biological plausibility and theoretical learning approaches, causing inefficient neural processing and impracticable multilayer extension thus significantly limitations on speed and accuracy when handling the realistic cognitive tasks. In this work, a practical multilayer time-based spiking neuromorphic architecture, namely “MT-Spike”, is developed to fill this gap. With the proposed practical time-coding scheme, average delay response model, temporal error backpropagation algorithm and heuristic loss function, “MT-Spike” achieves more efficient neural processing through flexible neural model size reduction while offering very competitive classification accuracy for realistic recognition tasks. Simulation results well validate that the algorithmic power of deep multilayer learning can be seamlessly merged with the efficiency of time-based spiking neuromorphic architecture, demonstrating great potentials of “MT-Spike” in resource and power constrained embedded platforms.
Tao Liu 0023, Zihao Liu 0015, Fuhong Lin, Yier Jin, Gang Quan, Wujie Wen
ICCAD1