Baidu USA LLC

Eric Undersander

Gregory Diamos

Sercan Omer Arik

Hee Woo Jun

Sharan Narang

Described herein are systems and methods to prune deep neural network models in reducing the overall memory and compute requirements of these models. It is demonstrated that using block pruning and group lasso combined with pruning during training, block-sparse recurrent neural networks (RNNs) may be built as accurate as dense baseline models. Two different approaches are disclosed to induce block sparsity in neural network models: pruning blocks of weights in a layer and using group lasso regularization to create blocks of weights with zeros. Using these techniques, it is demonstrated that block-sparse RNNs with high sparsity can be created with small loss in accuracy. Block-sparse RNNs eliminate overheads related to data storage and irregular memory accesses while increasing hardware efficiency compared to unstructured sparsity.

Systems and methods for block-sparse recurrent neural networks

For the problem of waveform synthesis from spectrograms, presented herein are embodiments of an efficient neural network architecture, based on transposed convolutions to achieve a high compute intensity and fast inference. In one or more embodiments, for training of the convolutional vocoder architecture, losses are used that are related to perceptual audio quality, as well as a GAN framework to guide with a critic that discerns unrealistic waveforms. While yielding a high-quality audio, embodiments of the model can achieve more than 500 times faster than real-time audio synthesis. Multi-head convolutional neural network (MCNN) embodiments for waveform synthesis from spectrograms are also disclosed. MCNN embodiments enable significantly better utilization of modern multi-core processors than commonly-used iterative algorithms like Griffin-Lim and yield very fast (more than 300&#xd7; real-time) waveform synthesis. Embodiments herein yield high-quality speech synthesis, without any iterative algorithms or autoregression in computations.

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San Francisco, CA, United States of America

Eric Undersander