HAWX: A Hardware-Aware FrameWork for Fast and Scalable ApproXimation of DNNs

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2602.16336v2
• Date: Sat, 21 Feb 2026 09:39:22 GMT
• Title: HAWX: A Hardware-Aware FrameWork for Fast and Scalable ApproXimation of DNNs
• Authors: Samira Nazari, Mohammad Saeed Almasi, Mahdi Taheri, Ali Azarpeyvand, Ali Mokhtari, Ali Mahani, Christian Herglotz,
• Abstract summary: This work presents HAWX, a hardware-aware scalable exploration framework that employs multi-level sensitivity scoring to guide selective integration of AxC blocks.<n> Supported by predictive models for accuracy, power, and area, HAWX accelerates the evaluation of candidate configurations.<n> Experiments across state-of-the-art DNN benchmarks such as VGG-11, ResNet-18, and EfficientNetLite demonstrate that the efficiency benefits of HAWX scale exponentially with network size.
• Score: 2.0919087464519275
• License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
• Abstract: This work presents HAWX, a hardware-aware scalable exploration framework that employs multi-level sensitivity scoring at different DNN abstraction levels (operator, filter, layer, and model) to guide selective integration of heterogeneous AxC blocks. Supported by predictive models for accuracy, power, and area, HAWX accelerates the evaluation of candidate configurations, achieving over 23* speedup in a layer-level search with two candidate approximate blocks and more than (3*106)* speedup at the filter-level search only for LeNet-5, while maintaining accuracy comparable to exhaustive search. Experiments across state-of-the-art DNN benchmarks such as VGG-11, ResNet-18, and EfficientNetLite demonstrate that the efficiency benefits of HAWX scale exponentially with network size. The HAWX hardware-aware search algorithm supports both spatial and temporal accelerator architectures, leveraging either off-the-shelf approximate components or customized designs.

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