Peng Lin

Yue Zhang, Woyu Zhang, Shaocong Wang et al.

The brain is dynamic, associative and efficient. It reconfigures by associating the inputs with past experiences, with fused memory and processing. In contrast, AI models are static, unable to associate inputs with past experiences, and run on digital computers with physically separated memory and processing. We propose a hardware-software co-design, a semantic memory-based dynamic neural network (DNN) using memristor. The network associates incoming data with the past experience stored as semantic vectors. The network and the semantic memory are physically implemented on noise-robust ternary memristor-based Computing-In-Memory (CIM) and Content-Addressable Memory (CAM) circuits, respectively. We validate our co-designs, using a 40nm memristor macro, on ResNet and PointNet++ for classifying images and 3D points from the MNIST and ModelNet datasets, which not only achieves accuracy on par with software but also a 48.1% and 15.9% reduction in computational budget. Moreover, it delivers a 77.6% and 93.3% reduction in energy consumption.

Peng Lin, Martin Neil, Norman Fenton

Hybrid Bayesian networks (HBN) contain complex conditional probabilistic distributions (CPD) specified as partitioned expressions over discrete and continuous variables. The size of these CPDs grows exponentially with the number of parent nodes when using discrete inference, resulting in significant inefficiency. Normally, an effective way to reduce the CPD size is to use a binary factorization (BF) algorithm to decompose the statistical or arithmetic functions in the CPD by factorizing the number of connected parent nodes to sets of size two. However, the BF algorithm was not designed to handle partitioned expressions. Hence, we propose a new algorithm called stacking factorization (SF) to decompose the partitioned expressions. The SF algorithm creates intermediate nodes to incrementally reconstruct the densities in the original partitioned expression, allowing no more than two continuous parent nodes to be connected to each child node in the resulting HBN. SF can be either used independently or combined with the BF algorithm. We show that the SF+BF algorithm significantly reduces the CPD size and contributes to lowering the tree-width of a model, thus improving efficiency.

Peng Lin, Martin Neil, Norman Fenton

Performing efficient inference on Bayesian Networks (BNs), with large numbers of densely connected variables is challenging. With exact inference methods, such as the Junction Tree algorithm, clustering complexity can grow exponentially with the number of nodes and so computation becomes intractable. This paper presents a general purpose approximate inference algorithm called Triplet Region Construction (TRC) that reduces the clustering complexity for factorized models from worst case exponential to polynomial. We employ graph factorization to reduce connection complexity and produce clusters of limited size. Unlike MCMC algorithms TRC is guaranteed to converge and we present experiments that show that TRC achieves accurate results when compared with exact solutions.

Peng Lin

Risk aggregation is a popular method used to estimate the sum of a collection of financial assets or events, where each asset or event is modelled as a random variable. Applications, in the financial services industry, include insurance, operational risk, stress testing, and sensitivity analysis, but the problem is widely encountered in many other application domains. This thesis has contributed two algorithms to perform Bayesian risk aggregation when model exhibit hybrid dependency and high dimensional inter-dependency. The first algorithm operates on a subset of the general problem, with an emphasis on convolution problems, in the presence of continuous and discrete variables (so called hybrid models) and the second algorithm offer a universal method for general purpose inference over much wider classes of Bayesian Network models.