DISCRETE DATA REPRESENTATION SUPPORTED DEVICE AND METHOD FOR FORWARD OPERATION OF ARTIFICIAL NEURAL NETWORK

摘要

The present disclosure provides a device configured to perform a forward operation of an artificial neural network supporting discrete data representation. The device includes an instruction caching unit, a controller unit, a data access unit, an interconnecting module, a primary operating module, a plurality of secondary operating modules, a discrete data operating module, and a converting module. The forward operation of the multilayer artificial neural network supporting the discrete data representation may be achieved by means of using the device. The data, such as weights and neurons, in the forward operation may be discretely represented. For example, -1, -1/2, 0, 1/2, 1 are not the successive data. A module supporting discrete data operations is provided. Basic operations of the successive data, for example a multiplication operation and an addition operation are replaced with different bitwise operations, for example an exclusive-OR operation and a NOT operation, according to the values of the discrete data. A module configured to convert the successive data into the discrete data is provided. A method for using the device to support a batch normalization operation is provided.