H3DFact: Heterogeneous 3D Integrated CIM for Factorization with Holographic Perceptual Representations

Disentangling attributes of various sensory signals is central to human-like perception and reasoning and a critical task for higher-order cognitive and neuro-symbolic AI systems. An elegant approach to represent this intricate factorization is via high-dimensional holographic vectors drawing on brain-inspired vector symbolic architectures. However, holographic factorization involves iterative computation with high-dimensional matrix-vector multiplications and suffers from non-convergence problems. In this paper, we present H3DFact, a heterogeneous 3D integrated in-memory compute engine capable of efficiently factorizing high-dimensional holographic representations. H3DFact exploits the computation-in-superposition capability of holographic vectors and the intrinsic stochasticity associated with memristive-based 3D compute-in-memory. Evaluated on large-scale factorization and perceptual problems, H3DFact demonstrates superior capability in factorization accuracy and operational capacity by up to five orders of magnitude, with 5.5 x compute density, 1.2 x energy efficiency improvements, and 5.9 x less silicon footprint compared to iso-capacity 2D designs.