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Researcher profile

Elisabetta Farella

Elisabetta Farella contributes to research discovery and scholarly infrastructure.

ResearcherAffiliation not importedOpen to collaborate
eess.ASMachine LearningArtificial IntelligenceComputer VisionSoundHardware ArchitectureNeural and Evolutionary Computing

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Published work

6 published item(s)

preprint2026arXiv

Elastic Spiking Transformers for Efficient Gesture Understanding

Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs), particularly Spiking Transformers, offer energy-efficient processing of event-based sensor data for healthcare applications. Yet current architectures are rigid: they are trained and deployed as static networks with fixed parameter counts and computational graphs. This limits deployment on neuromorphic hardware such as Loihi and SpiNNaker, where on-chip constraints often require smaller models that trade accuracy for feasibility. We introduce the Elastic Spiking Transformer, a runtime-adaptive architecture that brings elasticity into the spiking paradigm. Inspired by Matryoshka-style representation learning, it embeds nested elasticity in the Feature Extractor, Spiking Self-Attention, and Feed-Forward blocks. Through granularity-aware weight sharing, a single universal model can dynamically slice network width and attention heads at inference time without retraining. This design provides two key advantages for SNNs. First, it allows the model to adjust its parameter footprint to different hardware memory budgets. Second, reducing active neurons also lowers spike firing rates, yielding proportional reductions in synaptic operations, an energy benefit not directly available in standard artificial neural networks. We evaluate the approach on CIFAR10/100, CIFAR10-DVS, and the EHWGesture clinical gesture understanding dataset. Results show that one Elastic Spiking Transformer spans a broad range of complexity-accuracy trade-offs, matching or surpassing independently trained baselines while supporting adaptive, real-time gesture recognition on resource-constrained edge devices.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2022arXiv

Low-complexity acoustic scene classification in DCASE 2022 Challenge

This paper presents an analysis of the Low-Complexity Acoustic Scene Classification task in DCASE 2022 Challenge. The task was a continuation from the previous years, but the low-complexity requirements were changed to the following: the maximum number of allowed parameters, including the zero-valued ones, was 128 K, with parameters being represented using INT8 numerical format; and the maximum number of multiply-accumulate operations at inference time was 30 million. The provided baseline system is a convolutional neural network which employs post-training quantization of parameters, resulting in 46.5 K parameters, and 29.23 million multiply-and-accumulate operations (MMACs). Its performance on the evaluation data is 44.2% accuracy and 1.532 log-loss. In comparison, the top system in the challenge obtained an accuracy of 59.6% and a log loss of 1.091, having 121 K parameters and 28 MMACs. The task received 48 submissions from 19 different teams, most of which outperformed the baseline system.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2022arXiv

Sub-mW Keyword Spotting on an MCU: Analog Binary Feature Extraction and Binary Neural Networks

Keyword spotting (KWS) is a crucial function enabling the interaction with the many ubiquitous smart devices in our surroundings, either activating them through wake-word or directly as a human-computer interface. For many applications, KWS is the entry point for our interactions with the device and, thus, an always-on workload. Many smart devices are mobile and their battery lifetime is heavily impacted by continuously running services. KWS and similar always-on services are thus the focus when optimizing the overall power consumption. This work addresses KWS energy-efficiency on low-cost microcontroller units (MCUs). We combine analog binary feature extraction with binary neural networks. By replacing the digital preprocessing with the proposed analog front-end, we show that the energy required for data acquisition and preprocessing can be reduced by 29x, cutting its share from a dominating 85% to a mere 16% of the overall energy consumption for our reference KWS application. Experimental evaluations on the Speech Commands Dataset show that the proposed system outperforms state-of-the-art accuracy and energy efficiency, respectively, by 1% and 4.3x on a 10-class dataset while providing a compelling accuracy-energy trade-off including a 2% accuracy drop for a 71x energy reduction.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2021arXiv

Enabling energy efficient machine learning on a Ultra-Low-Power vision sensor for IoT

The Internet of Things (IoT) and smart city paradigm includes ubiquitous technology to extract context information in order to return useful services to users and citizens. An essential role in this scenario is often played by computer vision applications, requiring the acquisition of images from specific devices. The need for high-end cameras often penalizes this process since they are power-hungry and ask for high computational resources to be processed. Thus, the availability of novel low-power vision sensors, implementing advanced features like in-hardware motion detection, is crucial for computer vision in the IoT domain. Unfortunately, to be highly energy-efficient, these sensors might worsen the perception performance (e.g., resolution, frame rate, color). Therefore, domain-specific pipelines are usually delivered in order to exploit the full potential of these cameras. This paper presents the development, analysis, and embedded implementation of a realtime detection, classification and tracking pipeline able to exploit the full potential of background filtering Smart Vision Sensors (SVS). The power consumption obtained for the inference - which requires 8ms - is 7.5 mW.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2021arXiv

Sound Event Detection with Binary Neural Networks on Tightly Power-Constrained IoT Devices

Sound event detection (SED) is a hot topic in consumer and smart city applications. Existing approaches based on Deep Neural Networks are very effective, but highly demanding in terms of memory, power, and throughput when targeting ultra-low power always-on devices. Latency, availability, cost, and privacy requirements are pushing recent IoT systems to process the data on the node, close to the sensor, with a very limited energy supply, and tight constraints on the memory size and processing capabilities precluding to run state-of-the-art DNNs. In this paper, we explore the combination of extreme quantization to a small-footprint binary neural network (BNN) with the highly energy-efficient, RISC-V-based (8+1)-core GAP8 microcontroller. Starting from an existing CNN for SED whose footprint (815 kB) exceeds the 512 kB of memory available on our platform, we retrain the network using binary filters and activations to match these memory constraints. (Fully) binary neural networks come with a natural drop in accuracy of 12-18% on the challenging ImageNet object recognition challenge compared to their equivalent full-precision baselines. This BNN reaches a 77.9% accuracy, just 7% lower than the full-precision version, with 58 kB (7.2 times less) for the weights and 262 kB (2.4 times less) memory in total. With our BNN implementation, we reach a peak throughput of 4.6 GMAC/s and 1.5 GMAC/s over the full network, including preprocessing with Mel bins, which corresponds to an efficiency of 67.1 GMAC/s/W and 31.3 GMAC/s/W, respectively. Compared to the performance of an ARM Cortex-M4 implementation, our system has a 10.3 times faster execution time and a 51.1 times higher energy-efficiency.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2020arXiv

Compact recurrent neural networks for acoustic event detection on low-energy low-complexity platforms

Outdoor acoustic events detection is an exciting research field but challenged by the need for complex algorithms and deep learning techniques, typically requiring many computational, memory, and energy resources. This challenge discourages IoT implementation, where an efficient use of resources is required. However, current embedded technologies and microcontrollers have increased their capabilities without penalizing energy efficiency. This paper addresses the application of sound event detection at the edge, by optimizing deep learning techniques on resource-constrained embedded platforms for the IoT. The contribution is two-fold: firstly, a two-stage student-teacher approach is presented to make state-of-the-art neural networks for sound event detection fit on current microcontrollers; secondly, we test our approach on an ARM Cortex M4, particularly focusing on issues related to 8-bits quantization. Our embedded implementation can achieve 68% accuracy in recognition on Urbansound8k, not far from state-of-the-art performance, with an inference time of 125 ms for each second of the audio stream, and power consumption of 5.5 mW in just 34.3 kB of RAM.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access