An End-to-End Workflow to Efficiently Compress and Deploy DNN Classifiers on SoC/FPGA
Romina Molina, Iván Morales, M.L. Crespo, Verónica Gil-Costa, Sergio Carrato, Giovanni Ramponi · IEEE Embedded Systems Letters · 2023
Machine learning models have demonstrated discriminative and representative learning capabilities over a wide range of applications, even at the cost of high computational complexity. Due to their parallel processing capabilities, reconfigurability, and low power consumption, Systems on Chip based on a Field Programmable Gate Array (SoC/FPGA) have been used to face this challenge. Nevertheless, SoC/FPGA devices are resource-constrained, which implies the need for optimal use of technology for the computation and storage operations involved in ML-based inference. Consequently, mapping a Deep Neural Network (DNN) architecture to a SoC/FPGA requires compression strategies to obtain a hardware design with a good compromise between effectiveness, memory footprint, and inference time. This paper presents an efficient end-to-end workflow for deploying DNNs on an SoC/FPGA by integrating hyperparameter tuning through Bayesian optimization with an ensemble of compression techniques.