Research article

Real-time fast learning hardware implementation

¹ DGUT-Cnam Institute, Dongguan University of Technology, 1, Daxue Rd., Songshan Lake, Dongguan, Guangdong Province, PR China
² HESAM/CNAM/CEDRIC 292 rue Saint Matin, 75003 Paris, France

^* e-mail: ming-jun.zhang@lecnam.net

Received: 23 October 2022
Accepted: 30 January 2023

Abstract

Machine learning algorithms are widely used in many intelligent applications and cloud services. Currently, the hottest topic in this field is Deep Learning represented often by neural network structures. Deep learning is fully known as deep neural network, and artificial neural network is a typical machine learning method and an important way of deep learning. With the massive growth of data, deep learning research has made significant achievements and is widely used in natural language processing (NLP), image recognition, and autonomous driving. However, there are still many breakthroughs needed in the training time and energy consumption of deep learning. Based on our previous research on fast learning architecture for neural network, in this paper, a solution to minimize the learning time of a fully connected neural network is analysed theoretically. Therefore, we propose a new parallel algorithm structure and a training method with over-tuned parameters. This strategy finally leads to an adaptation delay and the impact of this delay on the learning performance is analyzed using a simple benchmark case study. It is shown that a reduction of the adaptation step size could be proposed to compensate errors due to the delayed adaptation, then the gain in processing time for the learning phase is analysed as a function of the network parameters chosen in this study. Finally, to realize the real-time learning, this solution is implemented with a FPGA due to the parallelism architecture and flexibility, this integration shows a good performance and low power consumption.