Methods and apparatus to perform weight and activation compression and decompression

A non-transitory machine readable medium comprising instructions which, when executed, cause one or more processors to:

• execute a compression operation on a first portion of a matrix of weights for a neural network to obtain first compressed data, the first portion of the matrix is a sparse portion;
• execute the compression operation on a second portion of the matrix of weights for a neural network to obtain second compressed data, the second portion of the matrix is a sparse portion;
• determine first meta-data associated with the first compressed data and second meta-data associated with the second compressed data, a first portion of the first meta-data indicative of whether the first compressed data is compressed, a second portion of the first meta-data indicative of a cache size of the first compressed data, and a third portion of the first meta-data indicative of the compression operation executed to obtain the first compressed data;
• cause the first meta-data and the second meta-data to be stored contiguously in a first row of a memory;
• cause the first compressed data to be stored in a second row in the memory;
• and
• cause the second compressed data to be stored in a third row in the memory, wherein the second row and the third row are consecutive rows.

A method comprising:

• executing a compression operation on a first portion of a matrix of weights for a neural network to obtain first compressed data, the first portion of the matrix is a sparse portion;
• executing the compression operation on a second portion of the matrix of weights for a neural network to obtain second compressed data, the second portion of the matrix is a sparse portion;
• determining first meta-data associated with the first compressed data and second meta-data associated with the second compressed data, a first portion of the first meta-data indicative of whether the first compressed data is compressed, a second portion of the first meta-data indicative of a cache size of the first compressed data, and a third portion of the first meta-data indicative of the compression operation executed to obtain the first compressed data;
• causing the first meta-data and the second meta-data to be stored contiguously in a first row of a memory;
• causing the first compressed data to be stored in a second row in the memory;
• and
• causing the second compressed data to be stored in a third row in the memory, wherein the second row and the third row are consecutive rows.