Ising machines are specialized computers for finding the lowest energy states of Ising spin models, onto which many practical combinatorial optimization problems can be mapped. Simulated bifurcation (SB) is a quantum-inspired parallelizable algorithm for Ising problems that enables scalable multi-chip implementations of Ising machines. However, the computational performance of a previously proposed multi-chip architecture tends to saturate as the number of chips increases for a given problem size because both computation and communication are exclusive in the time domain. In this paper, we propose a streaming architecture for multi-chip implementations of SB-based Ising machines with full spin-to-spin connectivity. The data flow in in-chip computation is harmonized with the data flow in inter-chip communication, enabling the computation and communication to overlap and the communication time to be hidden. Systematic experiments demonstrate linear strong scaling of performance up to the vicinity of the ideal communication limit determined only by the latency of chip-to-chip communication. Our eight-FPGA (field-programmable gate array) cluster can compute a 32,768-spin problem with a high pipeline efficiency of 97.9%. The performance of a 79-FPGA cluster for a 100,000-spin problem, projected using a theoretical performance model validated on smaller experimental clusters, is comparable to that of a state-of-the-art 100,000-spin optical Ising machine.
Aggregated HPC resources have rigid allocation systems and programming models which struggle to adapt to diverse and changing workloads. Consequently, HPC systems fail to efficiently use the large pools of unused memory and increase the utilization of idle computing resources. Prior work attempted to increase the throughput and efficiency of supercomputing systems through workload co-location and resource disaggregation. However, these methods fall short of providing a solution that can be applied to existing systems without major hardware modifications and performance losses. In this paper, we improve the utilization of supercomputers by employing the new cloud paradigm of serverless computing. We show how serverless functions provide fine-grained access to the resources of batch-managed cluster nodes. We present an HPC-oriented Function-as-a-Service (FaaS) that satisfies the requirements of high-performance applications. We demonstrate a \emph{software resource disaggregation} approach where placing functions on unallocated and underutilized nodes allows idle cores and accelerators to be utilized while retaining near-native performance.
DistServe improves the performance of large language models (LLMs) serving by disaggregating the prefill and decoding computation. Existing LLM serving systems colocate the two phases and batch the computation of prefill and decoding across all users and requests. We find that this strategy not only leads to strong prefill-decoding interferences but also couples the resource allocation and parallelism plans for both phases. LLM applications often emphasize individual latency for each phase: time to first token (TTFT) for the prefill phase and time per output token (TPOT) of each request for the decoding phase. In the presence of stringent latency requirements, existing systems have to prioritize one latency over the other, or over-provision compute resources to meet both. DistServe assigns prefill and decoding computation to different GPUs, hence eliminating prefill-decoding interferences. Given the application's TTFT and TPOT requirements, DistServe co-optimizes the resource allocation and parallelism strategy tailored for each phase. DistServe also places the two phases according to the serving cluster's bandwidth to minimize the communication caused by disaggregation. As a result, DistServe significantly improves LLM serving performance in terms of the maximum rate that can be served within both TTFT and TPOT constraints on each GPU. Our evaluations show that on various popular LLMs, applications, and latency requirements, DistServe can serve 4.48x more requests or 10.2x tighter SLO, compared to state-of-the-art systems, while staying within latency constraints for > 90% of requests.
We address a key challenge for neuro-symbolic (NeSy) systems by leveraging convex and bilevel optimization techniques to develop a general gradient-based framework for end-to-end neural and symbolic parameter learning. The applicability of our framework is demonstrated with NeuPSL, a state-of-the-art NeSy architecture. To achieve this, we propose a smooth primal and dual formulation of NeuPSL inference and show learning gradients are functions of the optimal dual variables. Additionally, we develop a dual block coordinate descent algorithm for the new formulation that naturally exploits warm-starts. This leads to over 100x learning runtime improvements over the current best NeuPSL inference method. Finally, we provide extensive empirical evaluations across $8$ datasets covering a range of tasks and demonstrate our learning framework achieves up to a 16% point prediction performance improvement over alternative learning methods.
The fusion of causal models with deep learning introducing increasingly intricate data sets, such as the causal associations within images or between textual components, has surfaced as a focal research area. Nonetheless, the broadening of original causal concepts and theories to such complex, non-statistical data has been met with serious challenges. In response, our study proposes redefinitions of causal data into three distinct categories from the standpoint of causal structure and representation: definite data, semi-definite data, and indefinite data. Definite data chiefly pertains to statistical data used in conventional causal scenarios, while semi-definite data refers to a spectrum of data formats germane to deep learning, including time-series, images, text, and others. Indefinite data is an emergent research sphere inferred from the progression of data forms by us. To comprehensively present these three data paradigms, we elaborate on their formal definitions, differences manifested in datasets, resolution pathways, and development of research. We summarize key tasks and achievements pertaining to definite and semi-definite data from myriad research undertakings, present a roadmap for indefinite data, beginning with its current research conundrums. Lastly, we classify and scrutinize the key datasets presently utilized within these three paradigms.
Recently, graph neural networks have been gaining a lot of attention to simulate dynamical systems due to their inductive nature leading to zero-shot generalizability. Similarly, physics-informed inductive biases in deep-learning frameworks have been shown to give superior performance in learning the dynamics of physical systems. There is a growing volume of literature that attempts to combine these two approaches. Here, we evaluate the performance of thirteen different graph neural networks, namely, Hamiltonian and Lagrangian graph neural networks, graph neural ODE, and their variants with explicit constraints and different architectures. We briefly explain the theoretical formulation highlighting the similarities and differences in the inductive biases and graph architecture of these systems. We evaluate these models on spring, pendulum, gravitational, and 3D deformable solid systems to compare the performance in terms of rollout error, conserved quantities such as energy and momentum, and generalizability to unseen system sizes. Our study demonstrates that GNNs with additional inductive biases, such as explicit constraints and decoupling of kinetic and potential energies, exhibit significantly enhanced performance. Further, all the physics-informed GNNs exhibit zero-shot generalizability to system sizes an order of magnitude larger than the training system, thus providing a promising route to simulate large-scale realistic systems.
The rapid development of deep learning has made a great progress in segmentation, one of the fundamental tasks of computer vision. However, the current segmentation algorithms mostly rely on the availability of pixel-level annotations, which are often expensive, tedious, and laborious. To alleviate this burden, the past years have witnessed an increasing attention in building label-efficient, deep-learning-based segmentation algorithms. This paper offers a comprehensive review on label-efficient segmentation methods. To this end, we first develop a taxonomy to organize these methods according to the supervision provided by different types of weak labels (including no supervision, coarse supervision, incomplete supervision and noisy supervision) and supplemented by the types of segmentation problems (including semantic segmentation, instance segmentation and panoptic segmentation). Next, we summarize the existing label-efficient segmentation methods from a unified perspective that discusses an important question: how to bridge the gap between weak supervision and dense prediction -- the current methods are mostly based on heuristic priors, such as cross-pixel similarity, cross-label constraint, cross-view consistency, cross-image relation, etc. Finally, we share our opinions about the future research directions for label-efficient deep segmentation.
Deep neural networks have revolutionized many machine learning tasks in power systems, ranging from pattern recognition to signal processing. The data in these tasks is typically represented in Euclidean domains. Nevertheless, there is an increasing number of applications in power systems, where data are collected from non-Euclidean domains and represented as the graph-structured data with high dimensional features and interdependency among nodes. The complexity of graph-structured data has brought significant challenges to the existing deep neural networks defined in Euclidean domains. Recently, many studies on extending deep neural networks for graph-structured data in power systems have emerged. In this paper, a comprehensive overview of graph neural networks (GNNs) in power systems is proposed. Specifically, several classical paradigms of GNNs structures (e.g., graph convolutional networks, graph recurrent neural networks, graph attention networks, graph generative networks, spatial-temporal graph convolutional networks, and hybrid forms of GNNs) are summarized, and key applications in power systems such as fault diagnosis, power prediction, power flow calculation, and data generation are reviewed in detail. Furthermore, main issues and some research trends about the applications of GNNs in power systems are discussed.
Deep neural networks (DNNs) are successful in many computer vision tasks. However, the most accurate DNNs require millions of parameters and operations, making them energy, computation and memory intensive. This impedes the deployment of large DNNs in low-power devices with limited compute resources. Recent research improves DNN models by reducing the memory requirement, energy consumption, and number of operations without significantly decreasing the accuracy. This paper surveys the progress of low-power deep learning and computer vision, specifically in regards to inference, and discusses the methods for compacting and accelerating DNN models. The techniques can be divided into four major categories: (1) parameter quantization and pruning, (2) compressed convolutional filters and matrix factorization, (3) network architecture search, and (4) knowledge distillation. We analyze the accuracy, advantages, disadvantages, and potential solutions to the problems with the techniques in each category. We also discuss new evaluation metrics as a guideline for future research.
The recent proliferation of knowledge graphs (KGs) coupled with incomplete or partial information, in the form of missing relations (links) between entities, has fueled a lot of research on knowledge base completion (also known as relation prediction). Several recent works suggest that convolutional neural network (CNN) based models generate richer and more expressive feature embeddings and hence also perform well on relation prediction. However, we observe that these KG embeddings treat triples independently and thus fail to cover the complex and hidden information that is inherently implicit in the local neighborhood surrounding a triple. To this effect, our paper proposes a novel attention based feature embedding that captures both entity and relation features in any given entity's neighborhood. Additionally, we also encapsulate relation clusters and multihop relations in our model. Our empirical study offers insights into the efficacy of our attention based model and we show marked performance gains in comparison to state of the art methods on all datasets.
Dynamic programming (DP) solves a variety of structured combinatorial problems by iteratively breaking them down into smaller subproblems. In spite of their versatility, DP algorithms are usually non-differentiable, which hampers their use as a layer in neural networks trained by backpropagation. To address this issue, we propose to smooth the max operator in the dynamic programming recursion, using a strongly convex regularizer. This allows to relax both the optimal value and solution of the original combinatorial problem, and turns a broad class of DP algorithms into differentiable operators. Theoretically, we provide a new probabilistic perspective on backpropagating through these DP operators, and relate them to inference in graphical models. We derive two particular instantiations of our framework, a smoothed Viterbi algorithm for sequence prediction and a smoothed DTW algorithm for time-series alignment. We showcase these instantiations on two structured prediction tasks and on structured and sparse attention for neural machine translation.