DiaNet: An elastic neural network for effectively re-configurable implementation

An elastic neural network is developed and evolved towards effectively re-configurable hardware in fully parallel on chip. The original prototype of DiaNet is organized as a symmetrical bisection neural network, which is feasible to be partitioned into arbitrary pieces of neural networks (NNs) without redundancy. To prevent the depth explosion in implementing complex tasks (complicated pattern recognition for instance), the evolution of DiaNets is investigated in this work. By using the I/O layer integration technology which enables all neurons in the hidden layer of DiaNet to receive inputs, the number of layers is reduced to 8.8% of DiaNet prototype. In this manner, the DiaNet topology is feasible to implement complex NNs without the risk of depth explosion. Moreover, the skip connection technology is proposed to avoid the gradient vanishing due to deep learning, which is significant to DiaNets especially. Compared with the LeNet5 model as state-of-the-art, the evolved DiaNet topology achieves the parameter reduction of 90.86% for MNIST recognition with the negligible loss of accuracy. To reduce hardware utilization, the sensitivity to the decline of computational precision and bit-width is investigated to suggest the guideline for efficient hardware implementations. Finally, the effectiveness of DiaNet is verified by the proposed re-configurable architecture on FPGA with the power reduction of 10.8% compared to state-of-the-art implementations. (c) 2021 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/).