GANDSE: Generative Adversarial Network based Design Space Exploration for Neural Network Accelerator Design

TL;DR

GANDSE introduces a GAN-based framework for efficient and effective exploration of high-dimensional design spaces in neural network accelerator development, outperforming traditional methods in optimization quality and speed.

Contribution

This paper presents a novel GAN-based approach for neural network accelerator design space exploration, addressing high-dimensional complexity more effectively than existing methods.

Findings

GANDSE finds more optimized designs in negligible time.

It outperforms multilayer perceptron and deep reinforcement learning approaches.

The method effectively handles high-dimensional design spaces.

Abstract

With the popularity of deep learning, the hardware implementation platform of deep learning has received increasing interest. Unlike the general purpose devices, e.g., CPU, or GPU, where the deep learning algorithms are executed at the software level, neural network hardware accelerators directly execute the algorithms to achieve higher both energy efficiency and performance improvements. However, as the deep learning algorithms evolve frequently, the engineering effort and cost of designing the hardware accelerators are greatly increased. To improve the design quality while saving the cost, design automation for neural network accelerators was proposed, where design space exploration algorithms are used to automatically search the optimized accelerator design within a design space. Nevertheless, the increasing complexity of the neural network accelerators brings the increasing dimensions to the design space. As a result, the previous design space exploration algorithms are no longer effective enough to find an optimized design. In this work, we propose a neural network accelerator design automation framework named GANDSE, where we rethink the problem of design space exploration, and propose a novel approach based on the generative adversarial network (GAN) to support an optimized exploration for high dimension large design space. The experiments show that GANDSE is able to find the more optimized designs in negligible time compared with approaches including multilayer perceptron and deep reinforcement learning.