Microsoft Technology Licensing, LLC

Yiren Zhao

Eric S Chung

Daniel Lo

Amar Phanishayee

Ritchie Zhao

Bita Darvish Rouhani

Apparatus and methods for training a neural network accelerator using quantized precision data formats are disclosed, and in particular for storing activation values from a neural network in a compressed format for use during forward and backward propagation training of the neural network. In certain examples of the disclosed technology, a computing system includes processors, memory, and a compressor in communication with the memory. The computing system is configured to perform forward propagation for a layer of a neural network to produced first activation values in a first block floating-point format. In some examples, activation values generated by forward propagation are converted by the compressor to a second block floating-point format having a narrower numerical precision than the first block floating-point format. The compressed activation values are stored in the memory, where they can be retrieved for use during back propagation.

Neural network activation compression with narrow block floating-point

Apparatus and methods for training a neural network accelerator using quantized precision data formats are disclosed, and in particular for storing activation values from a neural network in a compressed format having lossy or non-uniform mantissas for use during forward and backward propagation training of the neural network. In certain examples of the disclosed technology, a computing system includes processors, memory, and a compressor in communication with the memory. The computing system is configured to perform forward propagation for a layer of a neural network to produced first activation values in a first block floating-point format. In some examples, activation values generated by forward propagation are converted by the compressor to a second block floating-point format having a non-uniform and/or lossy mantissa. The compressed activation values are stored in the memory, where they can be retrieved for use during back propagation.

Neural network activation compression with non-uniform mantissas

Apparatus and methods for training a neural network accelerator using quantized precision data formats are disclosed, and, in particular, for adjusting floating-point formats used to store activation values during training. In certain examples of the disclosed technology, a computing system includes processors, memory, and a floating-point compressor in communication with the memory. The computing system is configured to produce a neural network comprising activation values expressed in a first floating-point format, select a second floating-point format for the neural network based on a performance metric, convert at least one of the activation values to the second floating-point format, and store the compressed activation values in the memory. Aspects of the second floating-point format that can be adjusted include the number of bits used to express mantissas, exponent format, use of non-uniform mantissas, and/or use of outlier values to express some of the mantissas.

Adjusting activation compression for neural network training

Apparatus and methods for training a neural network accelerator using quantized precision data formats having outlier values are disclosed, and in particular for storing activation values from a neural network in a compressed format for use during forward and backward propagation training of the neural network. In certain examples of the disclosed technology, a computing system is configured to perform forward propagation for a layer of a neural network to produced first activation values in a first block floating-point format. In some examples, activation values generated by forward propagation are converted by the compressor to a second block floating-point format having a narrower numerical precision than the first block floating-point format. Outlier values, comprising additional bits of mantissa and/or exponent are stored in ancillary storage for subset of the activation values. The compressed activation values are stored in the memory, where they can be retrieved for use during back propagation.

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Cambridge, United Kingdom

Yiren Zhao