Mortar: Morphing the Bit Level Sparsity for General Purpose Deep Learning Acceleration

Vanilla Deep Neural Networks (DNN) after training are represented with native floating-point 32 (fp32) weights. We observe that the bit-level sparsity of these weights is very abundant in the mantissa and can be directly exploited to speed up model inference. In this paper, we propose Mortar, an off-line/on-line collaborated approach for fp32 DNN acceleration, which includes two parts: first, an off-line bit sparsification algorithm to construct the target formulation by “mantissa morphing”, which maintains higher model accuracy while increasing bit-level sparsity; second, the associating hardware accelerator architecture to speed up the on-line fp32 inference through manipulating the enlarged bit sparsity. We highlight the following results by evaluating various deep learning tasks, including image classification, object detection, video understanding, video & image super-resolution, etc.: We (1) increase bit-level sparsity up to 1.28~2.51x with only a negligible -0.09~0.23% accuracy loss, (2) maintain on average 3.55% higher model accuracy while increasing more bit-level sparsity than the baseline, (3)and our hardware accelerator outperforms up to 4.8x over the baseline, with an area of 0.031 mm
²
and power of 68.58mW.