Intel Corporation
SYSTEM AND METHOD FOR BALANCING SPARSITY IN WEIGHTS FOR ACCELERATING DEEP NEURAL NETWORKS

Abstract:

An apparatus is provided to access a weight vector of a layer in a sequence of layers in the DNN. The weight vector includes a first sequence of weights having different values. A bitmap is generated based on the weight vector. The bitmap includes a second sequence of bitmap elements. Each bitmap element corresponds to a different weight and has a value determined based at least on the value of the corresponding weight. The index of each bitmap element in the second sequence matches the index of the corresponding weight in the first sequence. A new bitmap is generated by rearranging the bitmap elements in the second sequence based on the values of the bitmap elements. The weight vector is rearranged based on the new bitmap. The rearranged weight vector is divided into subsets, each of which is assigned to a different PE for a MAC operation.