Konstantina Sofia Charalampeli

The emerging Kolmogorov–Arnold networks (KANs) have set a new standard in machine learning (ML) tasks by prevailing over traditionally deployed multilayer perceptrons (MLPs) thanks to their enhanced interpretability through activation function learning, while they require increased computational complexity and memory footprint. Radial-basis function (RBF)-based KAN models maintain high performance over other variants of KANs with considerable size reduction and consequently more efficient execution. Aiming at effectively supporting the inference of RBF-KANs on Internet-of-Things (IoT) devices, this paper focuses on edge-oriented computing and introduces a soft intellectual property (IP) core, written in hardware description language (HDL), targeting the execution of such networks on all-programmable systems-on-chip (APSoC). The proposed design is fully pipelined and runtime configurable, allowing for real-time inference and latency-sensitive neural network deployment on-the-fly. A testbench reveals up to $43.6\times$ speedup when compared with a commercial edge central processing unit (CPU) and consumes considerably less power. The core’s adaptable design enables efficient allocation of resources and meets diverse throughput demands, making it well-suited for a broad range of IoT applications.