SAI: Self-Adjusting Incremental Quantile Estimation for Sparse Training of Neural Networks on Hardware Accelerators.

Supporting sparse training of neural networks has become a trend for hardware accelerators. Existing sparse training algorithms generally rely on sorting to compress neural network models. The accelerated sparse training of hardware accelerators is inseparable from the hardware implementation of sorting, which should have the characteristics of one-pass, storage-friendly, and non-dependent hyperparameters. In this paper, we propose a hardware friendly and one-pass Self-Adjusting Incremental Quantile Estimation method, shorten to SAI, to replace the sorting operations commonly used in sparse training algorithms. After applying SAI to sparse training of neural network models, our method reduces the time cost of determining to clip and activate connections to $O(n)$ , and avoids auxiliary storage and frequent I/O operations, which is unattainable by sorting. SAI-based sparse training algorithms show the performance advantages under the condition of smaller sparsity, and can effectively develop parallelism. We design the quantile estimation module of SAI, and test its effect on the image classification combined with sparse training algorithm on CIFAR-10 dataset. Experimental results show that SAI-based sparse training algorithms can achieve high accuracy, and has obvious parallel optimization ability.