Trivial Artificial Neural Network in Assembly Language

Source code for this article may be found here.

Note for nerds: The code shown in this article may be incomplete and may not contain all the security checks you would usually perform in your code as it is given here for demonstration purposes only. Downloadable source code may contain bugs (there is no software without bugs at all). It is provided as is without any warranty. You may use and redistribute it as you wish while mentioning this site and the author.

I was recently digging through my sources and came across a small ANN (artificial neural network) library I wrote several months ago in 64 bit Intel Assembly language (FASM syntax) and decided to share it with my respected readers hoping that it may be useful in some cases.

Artificial Neural Network

Internet is full of articles covering this topic either in general or in depth. Personally, I would prefer not to create yet another clone with pictures of Synapses, etc. In short ANN is a computational model inspired by the way our brain seems to work. There is a good article on Wikipedia giving quite a good amount of explanations. It seems to be important to mention, that saying "ANN" people usually think of Perceptron or Multilayer Perceptron, but there are much more types out there. You should check out this article if you are interested. 

However, this article covers implementation of Multilayer Perceptron in Assembly language, which appears to be easier than it sounds. The library is appropriate for creation of multilayer perceptrons with any number of hidden layers, any number of input and output neurons, although, it is bound to 64 bit Linux, I will try to explain how you can change the code to make it compatible with 64 Windows, but it would take much more effort to actually rewrite the whole thing to run on 32 bit platforms.

Neuron

This is the basis of the whole project. Neuron is the main part of the calculation. In this example, all neurons are arranged into a linked list, having input neurons at the beginning of the list and output neurons at its end. It is important to mention that they would all be processed in the same order they appear in the linked list. First of all, let's define a structure, that would contain all the information we need for a single neuron:

struc list

{

   .prev_ptr    dq ?

   .next_ptr    dq ?

}

struc neuron

{

   .list        list  ;Pointers to previous and next neurons

   .input       dq ?  ;Pointer to the first input synapse

   .output      dq ?  ;Pointer to the first output synapse

   .value       dq ?  ;Resulting value of the neuron

   .signal      dq ?  ;Error signal

   .sum         dq ?  ;Sum of all weighted inputs

   .bias        dq ?  ;Bias weight (threshold)

   .bias_delta  dq ?  ;Bias weight delta

   .index       dw ?  ;Index of the given neuron

   .num_inputs  dw ?  ;Number of input synapses

   .num_outputs dw ?  ;Number of output synapses

   .type        dw ?  ;Type of the neuron (bit field)

   .size        = $ - .list

}

Figure 1 shows the arrangement of neurons in a perceptron designed to perform XOR operation. It has 2 input neurons, three neurons in the hidden layer and two output neurons. Arrows show the order of processing.

Figure 1

I implemented this perceptron with 2 output neurons for testing purposes only, as it could well be implemented with a single output neuron, where output value > 0.5 would be 1 and below would be 0.

Synapse

There would be no perceptron without synaptic links. This is where the following structure appears on the scene.

struc synaps
{
   .inputs        list   ;Pointers to previous and next input synapses
                         ;if such exist
   .outputs       list   ;Pointers to previous and next output synapses
                         ;if such exist
   .value         dq ?   ;Value to be transmitted
   .weight        dq ?   ;Weight of the synapse
   .delta         dq ?   ;Weight delta
   .signal        dq ?   ;Error signal
   .input_index   dw ?   ;Index of the input neuron in the list of neurons
   .output_index  dw ?   ;Index of the output neuron in the list of neurons
                  dd ?   ;Alignment
   .size          = $ - .inputs
}

At first, it may be a bit hard to understand why there are so many pointers in both structures. Unfortunately, my verbal abilities are far from being perfect (especially, given that English is not my mother tongue), therefore, let me illustrate the way neurons are interconnected with synapses in this implementation first (in a hope that my graphic abilities are not worse then verbal).

Figure 2

Figure 2 shows that each neuron (except the output ones) has a pointer (neuron.output) to a list of synapses that need to be fed with this neuron's calculated value. For a neuron, its output synapses are linked with synaps.outputs pointers. In turn, each neuron (except the input ones) has a pointer (neuron.input) to a list of synapses to collect inputs from. On the figure, each gray arrow goes from a neuron in the left layer to a neuron in the right layer through the corresponding synaptic link.

Processing a Single Neuron

Each neuron in the network is processed with the same function which prototype in C is like this:

void neuron_process(neuron_t* n, int activation_type);

where n is a pointer to the neuron we want to process and activation_type specifies which activation function should be used. As I have mentioned above, this implementation only has one activation function - logistic (aka exponential):

f(x) = 1.0 / (1.0 + exp(-2 * x))

The following piece of code is an Assembly implementation of EXP():

;double exp(double d)

exp:

   push   rbp

   mov    rbp, esp

   sub    rsp, 8

   push   rbx rcx rdx rdi rsi

   movsd  qword [rbp-8], xmm0

   fld    qword [rbp-8]

   fld2e

   fmulp  st1, st0

   fld    st0

   frndint

   fsub   st1, st0

   fxch   st1

   f2xm1

   fld1

   faddp  st1, st0

   fscale

   fstp   st1

   fstp   qword [rbp-8]

   fwait

   movsd  xmm0, qword [rbp-8]

   pop    rsi rdi rdx rcx rbx

   add    rsp, 8

   leave

   ret

Now the x itself. x is a sum of products of value and weight of all input synaptic links plus bias weight of a neuron. The result of f() is then stored to each and every output synaptic link (if not output neuron) in accordance to the diagram shown on figure 3:

Figure 3

.

The Net

We are almost done with building out net. Let's define a structure that would incorporate all the information about our perceptron and all values needed for training and execution:

struc net

{

   .neurons     dq ? ;Pointer to the first neuron in the linked list of neurons

   .outs         dq ? ;Pointer to the first output neuron

   .num_neurons  dd ? ;Total amount of neurons

   .activation   dd ? ;Which activation method to use (we only have one here)

   .qerror       dq ? ;Mean quadratic error

   .num_inputs   dw ? ;Number of input neurons

   .num_outputs  dw ? ;Number of output neurons

   .rate         dq ? ;Learning rate regulates learning speed

   .momentum     dq ? ;Roughly saying - error tolerance

   .size         = $ - .neurons

}

   

The Fun

The source code attached to this article implements all the functions needed to manipulate the network as needed. All functions are exported by the library and described in "ann.h". However, we only need to deal with few of them:

net_t* net_alloc(void);

This function allocates  the net_t object and returns a pointer.

void net_fill(net_t* net, int number_of_neurons, int number_of_inputs, int number_of_outputs);

This function populates the net with requested amount of neurons and sets all values and pointers accordingly.

void net_set_links(net_t* net, int* links);

This function is responsible for setting up all the synaptic links between neurons. While net is a pointer to previously allocated net_t structure, links is a pointer to the array of integer pairs terminated by a pair of 0's:

int pairs[][2]={

   {1, 3},

   {1, 4},

   {2, 4},

   {2, 5},

   {3, 6},

   {3, 7},

   {4, 6},

   {4, 7},

   {5, 6},

   {5, 7},

   {0, 0}};

The above array is exactly the one used in the supplied test application in order to set up links as shown on figure 3.

double net_train(net_t* net, double* values, double* targets);

This function is responsible for everything that is needed in order to train our perceptron using the back-propagation training paradigm. Returns mean quadratic error of all output neurons (which is also accessible through net->qerror).

values - array of values to be fed into the net prior to running it (the function does not check whether the length of the array is appropriate, so your code is responsible for that);

targets - array of expected results.

Due to the fact that we are using logistic activation function, it is necessary to normalize the input data to be in the range [0 < x < 1] (outputs would be in the same range as well).

Run this function as many times as needed in order to get a reasonable error. You will have to "play" with rate and momentum parameters to get best values, but you may start with 0.9 for rate and 0.02 for momentum. It is important to specify those values as the library does not check whether they are set or not!

void net_run(net_t* net, double* values);

This function is used in order to run the net. 

values - same as in case of net_train function;

This function does not return a value, so you have to manually access net->outs.

Attached Source Code

The attached source code may be compiled with flat assembler:

   fasm libann.asm libann.o

and linked to any C code compiled with GCC on 64 bit Linux.

Making the Code Windows Compatible

This requires a piece of work. First of all, you would have to edit the libann.asm file, changing the format ELF64 to format MS64 COFF and sections' attributes accordingly. You would also have to make some changes to the code. 64 bit Linux uses AMD64 ABI, while Microsoft has its own. Major differences are in how parameters are passed to functions. While in Linux they are passed via RDI, RSI, RDX, RCX, R8 and R9 (all the rest on the stack in reverse order) registers for integers and XMM0 - XMM7 for doubles, Microsoft uses RCX, RDX, R8 and R9 for integers and XMM0 - XMM3 for doubles and any additional parameters are passed on stack in reverse order.

Output

The output for XOR problem should look similar to this:

Output

Thanks for reading! Hope this article was interesting and may be even helpful.

See you at the next!