Acceleration of probabilistic reasoning through custom processor architecture

Abstract: Probabilistic reasoning is an essential tool for robust decision-making systems because of its ability to explicitly handle real-world uncertainty, constraints and causal relations. Consequently, researchers are developing hybrid models by combining Deep Learning with probabilistic reasoning for safety-critical applications like self-driving vehicles, autonomous drones, etc. However, probabilistic reasoning kernels do not execute efficiently on CPUs or GPUs. This paper, therefore, proposes a custom programmable processor to accelerate sum-product networks, an important probabilistic reasoning execution kernel. The processor has an optimized datapath architecture and memory hierarchy optimized for sum-product networks execution. Experimental results show that the processor, while requiring fewer computational and memory units, achieves a 12x throughput benefit over the Nvidia Jetson TX2 embedded GPU platform.