Robust Processing-In-Memory With Multibit ReRAM Using Hessian-Driven Mixed-Precision Computation

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This article presents an algorithmic approach to design reliable deep neural networks (DNNs) in the presence of stochastic variations in the network parameters induced by process variations in the bit cells in a processing-in-memory (PIM) architecture. We propose and derive a Hessian-based sensitivity metric that can be computed without computing or storing the full Hessian to identify and protect the “important” network parameters while allowing large variations in unprotected parameters. We also show that this metric can be used to aggressively quantize unprotected network parameters in the PIM for improved inference efficiency and compute density. Experiments on modern DNNs like ResNet, MobileNetv2, and DenseNet on CIFAR10 using measured RRAM device data shows the effectiveness of our approach.