BiHDTrans: binary hyperdimensional transformer for efficient multivariate time series classification
This addresses the problem of processing large volumes of time series data on resource-constrained edge devices, offering a scalable and low-latency solution, though it is incremental in combining existing paradigms.
The paper tackles efficient multivariate time series classification for IoT edge devices by introducing BiHDTrans, a binary hyperdimensional Transformer that integrates self-attention into HD computing, achieving at least 14.47% higher accuracy than SOTA HD models and 6.67% higher accuracy than SOTA binary Transformers, with hardware acceleration reducing inference latency by 39.4 times.
The proliferation of Internet-of-Things (IoT) devices has led to an unprecedented volume of multivariate time series (MTS) data, requiring efficient and accurate processing for timely decision-making in resource-constrained edge environments. Hyperdimensional (HD) computing, with its inherent efficiency and parallelizability, has shown promise in classification tasks but struggles to capture complex temporal patterns, while Transformers excel at sequence modeling but incur high computational and memory overhead. We introduce BiHDTrans, an efficient neurosymbolic binary hyperdimensional Transformer that integrates self-attention into the HD computing paradigm, unifying the representational efficiency of HD computing with the temporal modeling power of Transformers. Empirically, BiHDTrans outperforms state-of-the-art (SOTA) HD computing models by at least 14.47% and achieves 6.67% higher accuracy on average than SOTA binary Transformers. With hardware acceleration on FPGA, our pipelined implementation leverages the independent and identically distributed properties of high-dimensional representations, delivering 39.4 times lower inference latency than SOTA binary Transformers. Theoretical analysis shows that binarizing in holographic high-dimensional space incurs significantly less information distortion than directly binarizing neural networks, explaining BiHDTrans's superior accuracy. Furthermore, dimensionality experiments confirm that BiHDTrans remains competitive even with a 64% reduction in hyperspace dimensionality, surpassing SOTA binary Transformers by 1-2% in accuracy with 4.4 times less model size, as well as further reducing the latency by 49.8% compare to the full-dimensional baseline. Together, these contributions bridge the gap between the expressiveness of Transformers and the efficiency of HD computing, enabling accurate, scalable, and low-latency MTS classification.