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Ultrafast machine learning on FPGAs via Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks

aarushgupta.io

41–50 of 58 posts

Re: Ultrafast machine learning on FPGAs via Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks

#41
post #30
post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When aiming for 100k tok/s, you would still have CUDA overheads (on the order of microseconds) -- which might become the bottleneck, even if you do everything else right with the inference architecture. How are you planning to overcome that? EDIT: Oh, on second read, do you mean you're running the model on an FPGA?

You might be conflating throughput with latency. 100k tok/s is very different to 1 tok/10us.

When doing auto regressive inference, how often do you do a CUDA kernel call? What is the main bottleneck at the throughputs you're operating?

Re: Ultrafast machine learning on FPGAs via Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks

#42

Right. But ... this would limit you to either extremely small models or extremely large FPGA's, yes? If there's a simple machine learning task that requires a sub microsecond latency I can see the point but otherwise??

Yes, but simple models are far more expressive than people give them credit for.

As one example, I've shoved Lots of image recognition tasks ( like spotting undesirable products in industrial settings), image modification tasks (I have some models locally to process hand-drawn images and unwarp them, remove notebook paper lines, etc), audio modification tasks (part of my editing pipeline includes hand-editing audio to achieve some effect, doing that a few times, and training models to copy that edit), and all sorts of other things are similarly doable in much smaller models than you might think -- not as small as that driver code, but still small enough to fit in hobbyist FPGAs.

Not all of those require low latency or high throughput, but audio processing is expensive, so high throughput is nice; industrial applications often operate on fast streams of many products, so both throughput and latency are important; and more generally when you have fast models available (or any fast code really) you'll tend toward different thought patterns and creative ideas which you wouldn't have even considered otherwise and which wouldn't be possible without those faster solutions.

Now that I think about it, we average 1.5M inferences per second at $WORK, expected to scale up 10-30x this year, and we have a moderately tight latency budget. This solution wouldn't fit without a larger, more expensive FPGA, at least not unless KANs are comparatively that much more expressive than our current solution (based on past experimentation, my hunch is that they're not, but you never know), but it's borderline useful.

Re: Ultrafast machine learning on FPGAs via Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks

#43
post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A key benefit of KANs is expressivity, as each layer is significantly more expressive than an MLP layer. This can be seen in our benchmarks: KAN networks need fewer layers than MLPs to match or beat their performance, even in software. However, on GPUs, KAN implementations are far less efficient than MLPs: since B-spline locality is hard to exploit and lookup operations aren't as efficient. This is your original poin…

I generally agree with this rebuttal. Each KAN layer is more expressive on a per-layer basis, although there is a mapping to an MLP with more layers. With the current hardware implementations, yes, MLPs have an advantage overall. I can certainly respect the intention to make KANs faster, since it is a serious issue for more widespread adoption, and KANs certainly have their value. I'm still very skeptical of arguing…

Ah I see, that's an interesting point about higher depth potentially having other benefits. For our work on smaller models (e.g. generally <5 layers), this might not have been as relevant but I would definitely be interested to see implications for much deeper networks. As to your point about KANs performing better or worse depending on the specific task, we definitely did notice this to some extent (symbolic tasks were the best, non-symbolic tasks such as image recognition were the worst).

Re: Ultrafast machine learning on FPGAs via Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks

#44
post #38
post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is definitely a precision-performance tradeoff to consider. We explored this through ablation studies on bitwidth precision / resource usage in our work (Figure 6a in https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.12850 , Figure 4 in https://arxiv.org/pdf/2602.02056 ). Further exploration into the mechanics here would definitely be useful. Regarding your point that "90% of the benefit of KANs can be gained from a small variety of…

Can I just say that this is extremely impressive work for a master's level thesis. Incredible work and I hope you manage to continue fulfilling your fantastic potential in your career!

Thank you :)

Re: Ultrafast machine learning on FPGAs via Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks

#45
I am using an almost identical architecture of a combination of lut-nn and bitnet on an upcoming fungal network interface which is basically just a metal pole rammed into the forest floor with electrodes at the bottom, fpga lut-nn in between and lora transceiver at the top. Thank you for this paper it will make pitching the concept alot easier using this as a reference :*

Re: Ultrafast machine learning on FPGAs via Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks

#46
post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I generally agree with this rebuttal. Each KAN layer is more expressive on a per-layer basis, although there is a mapping to an MLP with more layers. With the current hardware implementations, yes, MLPs have an advantage overall. I can certainly respect the intention to make KANs faster, since it is a serious issue for more widespread adoption, and KANs certainly have their value. I'm still very skeptical of arguing…

Ah I see, that's an interesting point about higher depth potentially having other benefits. For our work on smaller models (e.g. generally <5 layers), this might not have been as relevant but I would definitely be interested to see implications for much deeper networks. As to your point about KANs performing better or worse depending on the specific task, we definitely did notice this to some extent (symbolic tasks w…

>symbolic tasks were the best, non-symbolic tasks such as image recognition were the worst

I wonder how much of that is not so much the overall task but the need to build up to a complex state where KANs can excel. If you consider the classic neuralnet edge detector example, it's hard to imagine a KAN doing the task more efficiently, it seems like a necessary task as part of the overall process but delegating a more capable system to a menial task is probably wasting resources.

One layer of conv2d might be enough to turn pixels into something that KANs manage better.

Re: Ultrafast machine learning on FPGAs via Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks

#47
post #46
post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ah I see, that's an interesting point about higher depth potentially having other benefits. For our work on smaller models (e.g. generally <5 layers), this might not have been as relevant but I would definitely be interested to see implications for much deeper networks. As to your point about KANs performing better or worse depending on the specific task, we definitely did notice this to some extent (symbolic tasks w…

> symbolic tasks were the best, non-symbolic tasks such as image recognition were the worst I wonder how much of that is not so much the overall task but the need to build up to a complex state where KANs can excel. If you consider the classic neuralnet edge detector example, it's hard to imagine a KAN doing the task more efficiently, it seems like a necessary task as part of the overall process but delegating a more…

This is definitely true: one could imagine a model with a mix of the two layers or a simple linear / MLP-like kernel doing "preprocessing" before KAN layers. Other work that explores task performances for KANs and MLPs generally finds KANs are worse at non-symbolic tasks, but it would be interesting to see if hybrid architectures could improve on this failure mode.

Re: Ultrafast machine learning on FPGAs via Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks

#48

I am using an almost identical architecture of a combination of lut-nn and bitnet on an upcoming fungal network interface which is basically just a metal pole rammed into the forest floor with electrodes at the bottom, fpga lut-nn in between and lora transceiver at the top. Thank you for this paper it will make pitching the concept alot easier using this as a reference :*

That is a really cool application of FPGA-based machine learning that I would not have thought of :)

Re: Ultrafast machine learning on FPGAs via Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks

#49

I am using an almost identical architecture of a combination of lut-nn and bitnet on an upcoming fungal network interface which is basically just a metal pole rammed into the forest floor with electrodes at the bottom, fpga lut-nn in between and lora transceiver at the top. Thank you for this paper it will make pitching the concept alot easier using this as a reference :*

Explain like I'm mycelially challenged?

Re: Ultrafast machine learning on FPGAs via Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks

#50
Sorry, I haven't had time to read your papers in full yet. Have you considered that LUTs on many FPGAs aren't 2:1 but instead, say, 6:3 and also may contain flip-flops and muxes? FPGA synthesis may not be as easy as "just" translating the activation functions to LUTs.
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