arXiv:2604.17040cs.LGcs.AR2026-04被引 1

脉冲稀疏性在边缘部署中未必省电省时,本文实测验证了这一点。

When Spike Sparsity Does Not Translate to Deployed Cost: VS-WNO on Jetson Orin Nano

  • 用脉冲波浪神经算子对比传统密集模型,测试其在边缘设备上的实际表现。
  • 尽管脉冲层稀疏度从54.26%降至18.15%,但延迟和能耗反而更高。
  • 发现部署栈未针对稀疏性优化,导致脉冲优势无法体现,适合边缘计算研究者参考。

脉冲神经算子因其事件驱动特性,理论上可在神经形态边缘计算中实现更低延迟与能耗。然而,这种优势在通用边缘GPU软件栈上是否成立仍不明确。本文在Jetson Orin Nano 8GB上,使用五个预训练的可变脉冲波浪神经算子(VS-WNO)和五个对应稠密波浪神经算子(WNO)检查点,在Darcy矩形基准上进行评估。在参考路径下,VS-WNO表现出显著算法稀疏性,平均脉冲率从第一脉冲层的54.26%降至第四层的18.15%。但在部署式请求路径下,该稀疏性并未降低实际开销:VS-WNO延迟为59.6毫秒,动态功耗228.0毫焦;而稠密WNO延迟为53.2毫秒,功耗180.7毫焦,且误差更低(1.77% vs 1.81%)。Nsight Systems分析显示,请求路径仍以启动主导,且内核密集执行:对于VS-WNO,cudaLaunchKernel占总CUDA API时间的81.6%,密集卷积核占GPU内核时间的53.8%;稠密WNO也呈现相同模式。在该类边缘GPU栈上,脉冲稀疏性虽可观测,但无法转化为实际部署成本降低,因运行时未随脉冲减少抑制密集任务。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

Spiking neural operators are appealing for neuromorphic edge computing because event-driven substrates can, in principle, translate sparse activity into lower latency and energy. Whether that advantage survives deployment on commodity edge-GPU software stacks, however, remains unclear. We study this question on a Jetson Orin Nano 8 GB using five pretrained variable-spiking wavelet neural operator (VS-WNO) checkpoints and five matched dense wavelet neural operator (WNO) checkpoints on the Darcy rectangular benchmark. On a reference-aligned path, VS-WNO exhibits substantial algorithmic sparsity, with mean spike rates decreasing from 54.26% at the first spiking layer to 18.15% at the fourth. On a deployment-style request path, however, this sparsity does not reduce deployed cost: VS-WNO reaches 59.6 ms latency and 228.0 mJ dynamic energy per inference, whereas dense WNO reaches 53.2 ms and 180.7 mJ, while also achieving slightly lower reference-path error (1.77% versus 1.81%). Nsight Systems indicates that the request path remains launch-dominated and dense rather than sparsity-aware: for VS-WNO, cudaLaunchKernel accounts for 81.6% of CUDA API time within the latency window, and dense convolution kernels account for 53.8% of GPU kernel time; dense WNO shows the same pattern. On this Jetson-class GPU stack, spike sparsity is measurable but does not reduce deployed cost because the runtime does not suppress dense work as spike activity decreases.

脉冲神经网络边缘计算性能评估硬件优化

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