On Hardware-efficient Inference in Probabilistic Circuits

Published: 26 Apr 2024, Last Modified: 15 Jul 2024UAI 2024 posterEveryoneRevisionsBibTeXCC BY 4.0
Keywords: Probabilistic Circuits, Hardware-efficient Inference, Approximate computing
Abstract: Probabilistic circuits (PCs) offer a promising avenue to perform embedded reasoning under uncertainty. They support efficient and exact computation of various probabilistic inference tasks by design. Hence, hardware-efficient computation of PCs is highly interesting for edge computing applications. As computations in PCs are based on arithmetic with probability values, they are typically performed in the log domain to avoid underflow. Unfortunately, performing the log operation on hardware is costly. Hence, prior work has focused on computations in the linear domain, resulting in high resolution and energy requirements. This work proposes the first dedicated approximate computing framework for PCs that allows for low-resolution logarithm computations. We leverage Addition As Int, resulting in linear PC computation with simple hardware elements. Further, we provide a theoretical approximation error analysis and present an error compensation mechanism. Empirically, our method obtains up to 357× and 649× energy reduction on custom hardware for evidence and MAP queries respectively with little or no computational error.
Supplementary Material: zip
List Of Authors: Yao, Lingyun and Trapp, Martin and Leslin, Jelin and Singh, Gaurav and Zhang, Peng and Periasamy, Karthekeyan and Andraud, Martin
Latex Source Code: zip
Signed License Agreement: pdf
Code Url: https://github.com/lingyunyao/AAI_Probabilistic_Circuits
Submission Number: 243
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