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Nonlinearities are crucial for capturing complex input-output relationships especially in deep neural networks. However, nonlinear functions often incur various hardware and compute overheads. Meanwhile, stochastic computing (SC) has emerged as a promising approach to tackle this challenge by trading output precision for hardware simplicity. To this end, this paper proposes a first-of-its-kind stochastic multivariate universal-radix finite-state machine (SMURF) that harnesses SC for hardware-simplistic multivariate nonlinear function generation at high accuracy. We present the finite-state machine (FSM) architecture for SMURF, as well as analytical derivations of sampling gate coefficients for accurately approximating generic nonlinear functions. Experiments demonstrate the superiority of SMURF, requiring only 16.07% area and 14.45% power consumption of Taylor-series approximation, and merely 2.22% area of look-up table (LUT) schemes.

Expectation Propagation (EP)-based Multiple-Input Multiple-Output (MIMO) detector is regarded as a state-of-the-art MIMO detector because of its exceptional performance. However, we find that the EP MIMO detector cannot guarantee to achieve the optimal performance due to the empirical parameter selection, including initial variance and damping factors. According to the influence of the moment matching and parameter selection for the performance of the EP MIMO detector, we propose a modified EP MIMO detector (MEPD). In order to obtain the optimal initial variance and damping factors, we adopt a deep learning scheme, in which we unfold the iterative processing of MEPD to establish MEPNet for parameters training. The simulation results show that MEPD with off-line trained parameters outperforms the original one in various MIMO scenarios. Besides, the proposed MEPD with deep learning parameters selection is more robust than EPD in practical scenarios., Comment: 11 pages, 13 figures