2020/09/08 by Albert Gural, Phillip Nadeau, Gural, Albert +5
Computer Science · Engineering · #Advanced Memory and Neural Computing #Advanced Neural Network Applications #FOS: Computer and information sciences #Machine Learning (cs.LG) #Machine Learning (stat.ML) #Machine Learning and ELM
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2009.03887
openalex publication_date 2020/09/08 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
The recent success of neural networks for solving difficult decision tasks has incentivized incorporating smart decision making "at the edge." However, this work has traditionally focused on neural network inference, rather than training, due to memory and compute limitations, especially in emerging non-volatile memory systems, where writes are energetically costly and reduce lifespan. Yet, the ability to train at the edge is becoming increasingly important as it enables real-time adaptability to device drift and environmental variation, user customization, and federated learning across devices. In this work, we address two key challenges for training on edge devices with non-volatile memory: low write density and low auxiliary memory. We present a low-rank training scheme that addresses these challenges while maintaining computational efficiency. We then demonstrate the technique on a representative convolutional neural network across several adaptation problems, where it out-performs standard SGD both in accuracy and in number of weight writes.