A Memory-oriented Optimization Approach to Reinforcement Learning on FPGA-based Embedded Systems.

Research output: Contribution to book/Conference proceedings/Anthology/ReportConference contributionContributedpeer-review

Contributors

Abstract

Reinforcement Learning (RL) represents the machine learning method that has come closest to showing human-like learning. While Deep RL is becoming increasingly popular for complex applications such as AI-based gaming, it has a high implementation cost in terms of both power and latency. Q-Learning, on the other hand, is a much simpler method that makes it more feasible for implementation on resource-constrained embedded systems for control and navigation. However, the optimal policy search in Q-Learning is a compute-intensive and inherently sequential process and a software-only implementation may not be able to satisfy the latency and throughput constraints of such applications. To this end, we propose a novel accelerator design with multiple design trade-offs for implementing Q-Learning on FPGA-based SoCs. Specifically, we analyze the various stages of the Epsilon-Greedy algorithm for RL and propose a novel microarchitecture that reduces the latency by optimizing the memory access during each iteration. Consequently, we present multiple designs that provide varying trade-offs between performance, power dissipation, and resource utilization of the accelerator. With the proposed approach, we report considerable improvement in throughput with lower resource utilization over state-of-The-Art design implementations.

Details

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationGLSVLSI 2021 - Proceedings of the 2021 Great Lakes Symposium on VLSI
Pages339-346
Number of pages8
Publication statusPublished - 22 Jun 2021
Peer-reviewedYes

External IDs

Scopus 85109211240

Keywords

Research priority areas of TU Dresden

ASJC Scopus subject areas

Keywords

  • energy-efficient computing, fpga, hardware accelerators, high-level synthesis, memory-centric computing