Quantized Non-Volatile Nanomagnetic Synapse based Autoencoder for
  Efficient Unsupervised Network Anomaly Detection
Muhammad Sabbir Alam Walid Al Misba Jayasimha Atulasimha
In the autoencoder based anomaly detection paradigm, implementing the
autoencoder in edge devices capable of learning in real-time is exceedingly
challenging due to limited hardware, energy, and computational resources. We
show that these limitations can be addressed by designing an autoencoder with
low-resolution non-volatile memory-based synapses and employing an effective
quantized neural network learning algorithm. We propose a ferromagnetic
racetrack with engineered notches hosting a magnetic domain wall (DW) as the
autoencoder synapses, where limited state (5-state) synaptic weights are
manipulated by spin orbit torque (SOT) current pulses. The performance of
anomaly detection of the proposed autoencoder model is evaluated on the NSL-KDD
dataset. Limited resolution and DW device stochasticity aware training of the
autoencoder is performed, which yields comparable anomaly detection performance
to the autoencoder having floating-point precision weights. While the limited
number of quantized states and the inherent stochastic nature of DW synaptic
weights in nanoscale devices are known to negatively impact the performance,
our hardware-aware training algorithm is shown to leverage these imperfect
device characteristics to generate an improvement in anomaly detection accuracy
(90.98%) compared to accuracy obtained with floating-point trained weights.
Furthermore, our DW-based approach demonstrates a remarkable reduction of at
least three orders of magnitude in weight updates during training compared to
the floating-point approach, implying substantial energy savings for our
method. This work could stimulate the development of extremely energy efficient
non-volatile multi-state synapse-based processors that can perform real-time
training and inference on the edge with unsupervised data.