Deboleena Roy

Chun Tao, Deboleena Roy, Indranil Chakraborty et al.

Applications based on Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) have grown exponentially in the past decade. To match their increasing computational needs, several Non-Volatile Memory (NVM) crossbar based accelerators have been proposed. Recently, researchers have shown that apart from improved energy efficiency and performance, such approximate hardware also possess intrinsic robustness for defense against adversarial attacks. Prior works quantified this intrinsic robustness for vanilla DNNs trained on unperturbed inputs. However, adversarial training of DNNs is the benchmark technique for robustness, and sole reliance on intrinsic robustness of the hardware may not be sufficient. In this work, we explore the design of robust DNNs through the amalgamation of adversarial training and intrinsic robustness of NVM crossbar-based analog hardware. First, we study the noise stability of such networks on unperturbed inputs and observe that internal activations of adversarially trained networks have lower Signal-to-Noise Ratio (SNR), and are sensitive to noise compared to vanilla networks. As a result, they suffer on average 2x performance degradation due to the approximate computations on analog hardware. Noise stability analyses show the instability of adversarially trained DNNs. On the other hand, for adversarial images generated using Square Black Box attacks, ResNet-10/20 adversarially trained on CIFAR-10/100 display a robustness gain of 20-30%. For adversarial images generated using Projected-Gradient-Descent (PGD) White-Box attacks, adversarially trained DNNs present a 5-10% gain in robust accuracy due to underlying NVM crossbar when $ε_{attack}$ is greater than $ε_{train}$. Our results indicate that implementing adversarially trained networks on analog hardware requires careful calibration between hardware non-idealities and $ε_{train}$ for optimum robustness and performance.

Deboleena Roy, Priyadarshini Panda, Kaushik Roy

Spiking neural networks (SNNs) offer a promising alternative to current artificial neural networks to enable low-power event-driven neuromorphic hardware. Spike-based neuromorphic applications require processing and extracting meaningful information from spatio-temporal data, represented as series of spike trains over time. In this paper, we propose a method to synthesize images from multiple modalities in a spike-based environment. We use spiking auto-encoders to convert image and audio inputs into compact spatio-temporal representations that is then decoded for image synthesis. For this, we use a direct training algorithm that computes loss on the membrane potential of the output layer and back-propagates it by using a sigmoid approximation of the neuron's activation function to enable differentiability. The spiking autoencoders are benchmarked on MNIST and Fashion-MNIST and achieve very low reconstruction loss, comparable to ANNs. Then, spiking autoencoders are trained to learn meaningful spatio-temporal representations of the data, across the two modalities - audio and visual. We synthesize images from audio in a spike-based environment by first generating, and then utilizing such shared multi-modal spatio-temporal representations. Our audio to image synthesis model is tested on the task of converting TI-46 digits audio samples to MNIST images. We are able to synthesize images with high fidelity and the model achieves competitive performance against ANNs.

Indranil Chakraborty, Deboleena Roy, Aayush Ankit et al.

The recent advent of `Internet of Things' (IOT) has increased the demand for enabling AI-based edge computing. This has necessitated the search for efficient implementations of neural networks in terms of both computations and storage. Although extreme quantization has proven to be a powerful tool to achieve significant compression over full-precision networks, it can result in significant degradation in performance. In this work, we propose extremely quantized hybrid network architectures with both binary and full-precision sections to emulate the classification performance of full-precision networks while ensuring significant energy efficiency and memory compression. We explore several hybrid network architectures and analyze the performance of the networks in terms of accuracy, energy efficiency and memory compression. We perform our analysis on ResNet and VGG network architectures. Among the proposed network architectures, we show that the hybrid networks with full-precision residual connections emerge as the optimum by attaining accuracies close to full-precision networks while achieving excellent memory compression, up to 21.8x in case of VGG-19. This work demonstrates an effective way of hybridizing networks which achieve performance close to full-precision networks while attaining significant compression, furthering the feasibility of using such networks for energy-efficient neural computing in IOT-based edge devices.