用脉冲神经网络实现文本处理的Transformer解码器,能耗降低90%以上。
SpikeDecoder: Realizing the GPT Architecture with Spiking Neural Networks

- 直接训练脉冲神经网络版Transformer解码器,不依赖预训练ANN转换。
- 在自然语言任务中实现87%~93%的理论能耗降低,性能损失可控。
- 适合关注低功耗AI、神经形态计算的研究者和工程师。
Transformer架构是自然语言处理中最强大的工具,但其复杂运算导致高能耗。为解决此问题,本文采用脉冲神经网络(SNN),因其事件驱动机制具有天然低功耗优势。尽管训练困难,我们提出SpikeDecoder,一种完全基于SNN的Transformer解码器,应用于自然语言处理。通过实验分析不同模块替换对性能的影响,探索残差连接与兼容SNN的归一化方法的作用,并对比多种将文本嵌入脉冲信号的方法。结果表明,所提SNN解码器相比传统ANN基线,理论能耗降低87%至93%。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
The Transformer architecture is widely regarded as the most powerful tool for natural language processing, but due to a high number of complex operations, it inherently faces the issue of high energy consumption. To address this issue, we consider Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs), which are an energy-efficient alternative to conventional Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs) due to their naturally event-driven approach to processing information. However, this inherently makes them difficult to train. Often, many SNN-based models circumvent this issue by converting pre-trained ANNs. More recently, attempts have been made to design directly trainable SNN-based adaptations of the Transformer model structure. Although the results showed great promise, the application field was computer vision. Moreover, the proposed model incorporates only encoder blocks. In this paper, we propose SpikeDecoder, a fully SNN-based implementation of the Transformer decoder block, for applications in natural language processing. In a series of experiments, we analyze the impact of exchanging different blocks of the ANN model with spike-based alternatives to identify trade-offs and significant sources of performance loss. We further investigate the role of residual connections and the selection of SNN-compatible normalization techniques. Besides the work on the model architecture, we formulate and compare different embedding methods to project text data into spikes. Finally, we demonstrate that our proposed SNN-based decoder block reduces the theoretical energy consumption by 87% to 93% compared to the ANN baseline.
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