# An Improved Template for Approximate Computing

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.06162 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.06162/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 2 of its 12 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 7 Sep 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [autoAx: An Automatic Design Space Exploration and Circuit Building Methodology utilizing Libraries of Approximate Components](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.10807/) (2019)
- [BLASYS: Approximate Logic Synthesis Using Boolean Matrix Factorization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.06050/) (2018)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Deploying neural networks on edge devices entails a careful balance between the energy required for inference and the accuracy of the resulting classification. One technique for navigating this tradeoff is approximate computing: the process of reducing energy consumption by slightly reducing the accuracy of arithmetic operators. In this context, we propose a methodology to reduce the area of the small arithmetic operators used in neural networks - i.e., adders and multipliers - via a small loss in accuracy, and show that we improve area savings for the same accuracy loss w.r.t. the state of the art. To achieve our goal, we improve on a boolean rewriting technique recently proposed, called XPAT, where the use of a parametrisable template to rewrite circuits has proved to be highly beneficial. In particular, XPAT was able to produce smaller circuits than comparable approaches while utilising a naive sum of products template structure. In this work, we show that template parameters can act as proxies for chosen metrics and we propose a novel template based on parametrisable product sharing that acts as a close proxy to synthesised area. We demonstrate experimentally that our methodology converges better to low-area solutions and that it can find better approximations than both the original XPAT and two other state-of-the-art approaches.