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An Efficient Hardware Implementation of Feed-Forward Neural Networks*

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Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNAI,volume 2070))

Abstract

This paper proposes a new way of digital hardware imple- mentation of nonlinear activation functions in feed-forward neural net- works. The basic idea of this new realization is that the nonlinear functions can be implemented using a matrix-vector multiplication. Recently a new approach was proposed for the realization of matrix-vector mul- tiplications which approach can also be applied for implementing the nonlinear functions if the nonlinear functions are approximated by sim- ple basis functions. The paper proposes to use B-spline basis functions to the approximate nonlinear sigmoidal functions, it shows that this ap proximation fulfills the general requirements on the activation functions, presents the details of the proposed hardware implementation, and gives a summary of an extensive study about the effects of B-spline nonlin- ear function realization on the size and the trainability of feed-forward neural networks.

This work was supported by the Hungarian Fund for Scientific Research (OTKA) under contract T023868

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© 2001 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

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Szabó, T., Horváth, G. (2001). An Efficient Hardware Implementation of Feed-Forward Neural Networks* . In: Monostori, L., Váncza, J., Ali, M. (eds) Engineering of Intelligent Systems. IEA/AIE 2001. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 2070. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-45517-5_34

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-45517-5_34

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-540-42219-8

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-540-45517-2

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