Register Tiling for Unstructured Sparsity in Neural Network Inference
Why this work is in the frame
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
Unstructured sparse neural networks are an important class of machine learning (ML) models, as they compact model size and reduce floating point operations. The execution time of these models is frequently dominated by the sparse matrix multiplication (SpMM) kernel, C = A × B , where A is a sparse matrix, and B and C are dense matrices. The unstructured sparsity pattern of matrices in pruned machine learning models along with their sparsity ratio has rendered useless the large class of libraries and systems that optimize sparse matrix multiplications. Reusing registers is particularly difficult because accesses to memory locations should be known statically. This paper proposes Sparse Register Tiling, a new technique composed of an unroll-and-sparse-jam transformation followed by data compression that is specifically tailored to sparsity patterns in ML matrices. Unroll-and-sparse-jam uses sparsity information to jam the code while improving register reuse. Sparse register tiling is evaluated across 2396 weight matrices from transformer and convolutional models with a sparsity range of 60-95% and provides an average speedup of 1.72× and 2.65× over MKL SpMM and dense matrix multiplication, respectively, on a multicore CPU processor. It also provides an end-to-end speedup of 2.12× for MobileNetV1 with 70% sparsity on an ARM processor commonly used in edge devices.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it