Alibaba Group Holding Limited
FREQUENCY DOMAIN NEURAL NETWORK ACCELERATOR

Abstract:

The present disclosure relates to systems and methods concerning a system including a host device and a convolutional neural network hardware accelerator. The hardware accelerator can be configured, at least in part by the host device, to generate activation data from spatial-domain input data and spatial-domain weight data using frequency-domain operations. The hardware accelerator can include one or more discrete Fourier transform units configured to generate a frequency-domain representation of the input data. The hardware accelerator can include a multiplication unit configured to generate a frequency-domain representation of the activation data by element-wise complex multiplication of the frequency-domain representation of the input data and a frequency-domain representation of the weight data. The hardware accelerator can also include an inverse discrete Fourier transform unit configured to generate a spatial-domain representation of the activation data from the frequency-domain representation of the activation data.