Nvidia Corporation

Amir Gholaminejad

Boris Ginsburg

Alex Fit-Florea

Pooya Davoodi

Michael Houston

Slawomir Kierat

Hao Wu

Sergei Nikolaev

Ahmad Kiswani

A method, computer readable medium, and system are disclosed for rounding floating point values. Dynamic directional rounding is a rounding technique for floating point operations. A floating point operation (addition, subtraction, multiplication, etc.) is performed on an operand to compute a floating point result. A sign (positive or negative) of the operand is identified. In one embodiment, the sign determines a direction in which the floating point result is rounded (towards negative or positive infinity). When used for updating parameters of a neural network during backpropagation, dynamic directional rounding ensures that rounding is performed in the direction of the gradient.

Dynamic directional rounding

Aspects of the present invention are directed to computer-implemented techniques for improving the training of artificial neural networks using a reduced precision (e.g., float16) data format. Embodiments of the present invention rescale tensor values prior to performing matrix operations (such as matrix multiplication or matrix addition) to prevent overflow and underflow. To preserve accuracy throughout the performance of the matrix operations, the scale factors are defined using a novel data format to represent tensors, wherein a matrix is represented by the tuple X, where X=(a, v[.]), wherein a is a float scale factor and v[.] are scaled values stored in the float16 format. The value of any element X[i] according to this data format would be equal to a*v[i].

Tensor processing using low precision format

Growing community of inventors

San Jose, CA, United States of America

Amir Gholaminejad