Massively Parallel and Asynchronous Tsetlin Machine Architecture Supporting Almost Constant-Time Scaling

TL;DR

This paper introduces a massively parallel, asynchronous architecture for Tsetlin Machines that eliminates the voting bottleneck, enabling near-constant-time scaling and significantly faster learning without sacrificing accuracy.

Contribution

It proposes a novel decentralized, asynchronous scheme for Tsetlin Machines that supports massive parallelism and reduces training time substantially.

Findings

Achieves up to 50 times faster learning.

Maintains accuracy despite using outdated voting tallies.

Supports processing of large datasets with more clauses.

Abstract

Using logical clauses to represent patterns, Tsetlin Machines (TMs) have recently obtained competitive performance in terms of accuracy, memory footprint, energy, and learning speed on several benchmarks. Each TM clause votes for or against a particular class, with classification resolved using a majority vote. While the evaluation of clauses is fast, being based on binary operators, the voting makes it necessary to synchronize the clause evaluation, impeding parallelization. In this paper, we propose a novel scheme for desynchronizing the evaluation of clauses, eliminating the voting bottleneck. In brief, every clause runs in its own thread for massive native parallelism. For each training example, we keep track of the class votes obtained from the clauses in local voting tallies. The local voting tallies allow us to detach the processing of each clause from the rest of the clauses, supporting decentralized learning. This means that the TM most of the time will operate on outdated voting tallies. We evaluated the proposed parallelization across diverse learning tasks and it turns out that our decentralized TM learning algorithm copes well with working on outdated data, resulting in no significant loss in learning accuracy. Furthermore, we show that the proposed approach provides up to 50 times faster learning. Finally, learning time is almost constant for reasonable clause amounts (employing from 20 to 7,000 clauses on a Tesla V100 GPU). For sufficiently large clause numbers, computation time increases approximately proportionally. Our parallel and asynchronous architecture thus allows processing of massive datasets and operating with more clauses for higher accuracy.