Exploration of Quantum Neural Architecture by Mixing Quantum Neuron Designs

With the constant increase of the number of quantum bits (qubits) in the actual quantum computers, implementing and accelerating the prevalent deep learning on quantum computers are becoming possible. Along with this trend, there emerge quantum neural architectures based on different designs of quantum neurons. A fundamental question in quantum deep learning arises: what is the best quantum neural architecture? Inspired by the design of neural architectures for classical computing which typically employs multiple types of neurons, this paper makes the very first attempt to mix quantum neuron designs to build quantum neural architectures. We observe that the existing quantum neuron designs may be quite different but complementary, such as neurons from variation quantum circuits (VQC) and Quantumflow. More specifically, VQC can apply real-valued weights but suffer from being extended to multiple layers, while QuantumFlow can build a multi-layer network efficiently, but is limited to use binary weights. To take their respective advantages, we propose to mix them together and figure out a way to connect them seamlessly without additional costly measurement. We further investigate the design principles to mix quantum neurons, which can provide guidance for quantum neural architecture exploration in the future. Experimental results demonstrate that the identified quantum neural architectures with mixed quantum neurons can achieve 90.62% of accuracy on the MNIST dataset, compared with 52.77% and 69.92% on the VQC and QuantumFlow, respectively.

Binary Complex Neural Network Acceleration on FPGA

Being able to learn from complex data with phase information is imperative for many signal processing applications. Today s real-valued deep neural networks (DNNs) have shown efficiency in latent information analysis but fall short when applied to the complex domain. Deep complex networks (DCN), in contrast, can learn from complex data, but have high computational costs; therefore, they cannot satisfy the instant decision-making requirements of many deployable systems dealing with short observations or short signal bursts. Recent, Binarized Complex Neural Network (BCNN), which integrates DCNs with binarized neural networks (BNN), shows great potential in classifying complex data in real-time. In this paper, we propose a structural pruning based accelerator of BCNN, which is able to provide more than 5000 frames/s inference throughput on edge devices. The high performance comes from both the algorithm and hardware sides. On the algorithm side, we conduct structural pruning to the original BCNN models and obtain 20 $times$ pruning rates with negligible accuracy loss; on the hardware side, we propose a novel 2D convolution operation accelerator for the binary complex neural network. Experimental results show that the proposed design works with over 90% utilization and is able to achieve the inference throughput of 5882 frames/s and 4938 frames/s for complex NIN-Net and ResNet-18 using CIFAR-10 dataset and Alveo U280 Board.