AUTHOR=Zhao Junyun , Huang Siyuan , Yousuf Osama , Gao Yutong , Hoskins Brian D. , Adam Gina C. TITLE=Gradient Decomposition Methods for Training Neural Networks With Non-ideal Synaptic Devices JOURNAL=Frontiers in Neuroscience VOLUME=15 YEAR=2021 URL=https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/neuroscience/articles/10.3389/fnins.2021.749811 DOI=10.3389/fnins.2021.749811 ISSN=1662-453X ABSTRACT=

While promising for high-capacity machine learning accelerators, memristor devices have non-idealities that prevent software-equivalent accuracies when used for online training. This work uses a combination of Mini-Batch Gradient Descent (MBGD) to average gradients, stochastic rounding to avoid vanishing weight updates, and decomposition methods to keep the memory overhead low during mini-batch training. Since the weight update has to be transferred to the memristor matrices efficiently, we also investigate the impact of reconstructing the gradient matrixes both internally (rank-seq) and externally (rank-sum) to the memristor array. Our results show that streaming batch principal component analysis (streaming batch PCA) and non-negative matrix factorization (NMF) decomposition algorithms can achieve near MBGD accuracy in a memristor-based multi-layer perceptron trained on the MNIST (Modified National Institute of Standards and Technology) database with only 3 to 10 ranks at significant memory savings. Moreover, NMF rank-seq outperforms streaming batch PCA rank-seq at low-ranks making it more suitable for hardware implementation in future memristor-based accelerators.