Improved Learning-Based Design Space Exploration for Approximate Instance Generation

Design methodologies for approximation of medium to large-scale accelerators have largely relied on search-based design space exploration. Due to the enormously sized solution space, Artificial Intelligence (AI) based heuristic search has remained one of the most common techniques to explore cost and performance trade-offs. As a sub-class of AI techniques, Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) has recently shown great potential as an intelligent stochastic search algorithm to solve computational problems with large branching factors. MCTS employs reinforced learning that combines past statistics and stochastic processes to traverse new paths in the search tree. Inspired by the success of MCTS in the games domain (AlphaGo), it has been recently applied to explore the solution space of approximate circuits. In this paper, a modified MCTS-based intelligent search technique is proposed that can handle huge search space for approximation of fairly large benchmark circuits. The proposed learning-based heuristic for MCTS directs the search towards deeper nodes in the search tree resulting in a rather asymmetric tree to efficiently utilize the search budget on the exploration of more promising nodes in the design space. The modified MCTS algorithm is based on reinforced learning where an agent uses past information to improve the overall gain. Experimental results confirm that the proposed heuristics can reach out to deeper nodes in the search tree which account for larger area savings in the context of approximate computing. The modified search algorithm enables 34.23% more area savings than the original search algorithm.