Design technology co-optimization (DTCO) plays a critical role in achieving optimal power, performance, and area (PPA) for advanced semiconductor process development. Cell library characterization is essential in DTCO flow, but traditional methods are time-consuming and costly. To overcome these challenges, we propose a graph neural network (GNN)-based machine learning model for rapid and accurate cell library characterization. Our model incorporates cell structures and demonstrates high prediction accuracy across various process-voltage-temperature (PVT) corners and technology parameters. Validation with 512 unseen technology corners and over one million test data points shows accurate predictions of delay, power, and input pin capacitance for 33 types of cells, with a mean absolute percentage error (MAPE) $\le$ 0.95% and a speed-up of 100X compared with SPICE simulations. Additionally, we investigate system-level metrics such as worst negative slack (WNS), leakage power, and dynamic power using predictions obtained from the GNN-based model on unseen corners. Our model achieves precise predictions, with absolute error $\le$3.0 ps for WNS, percentage errors $\le$0.60% for leakage power, and $\le$0.99% for dynamic power, when compared to golden reference. With the developed model, we further proposed a fine-grained drive strength interpolation methodology to enhance PPA for small-to-medium-scale designs, resulting in an approximate 1-3% improvement.
Most real-world Multi-Robot Task Allocation (MRTA) problems require fast and efficient decision-making, which is often achieved using heuristics-aided methods such as genetic algorithms, auction-based methods, and bipartite graph matching methods. These methods often assume a form that lends better explainability compared to an end-to-end (learnt) neural network based policy for MRTA. However, deriving suitable heuristics can be tedious, risky and in some cases impractical if problems are too complex. This raises the question: can these heuristics be learned? To this end, this paper particularly develops a Graph Reinforcement Learning (GRL) framework to learn the heuristics or incentives for a bipartite graph matching approach to MRTA. Specifically a Capsule Attention policy model is used to learn how to weight task/robot pairings (edges) in the bipartite graph that connects the set of tasks to the set of robots. The original capsule attention network architecture is fundamentally modified by adding encoding of robots' state graph, and two Multihead Attention based decoders whose output are used to construct a LogNormal distribution matrix from which positive bigraph weights can be drawn. The performance of this new bigraph matching approach augmented with a GRL-derived incentive is found to be at par with the original bigraph matching approach that used expert-specified heuristics, with the former offering notable robustness benefits. During training, the learned incentive policy is found to get initially closer to the expert-specified incentive and then slightly deviate from its trend.
The techniques used to generate pseudo-random numbers for Monte Carlo (MC) applications bear many implications on the quality and speed of that programs work. As a random number generator (RNG) slows, the production of random numbers begins to dominate runtime. As RNG output grows in correlation, the final product becomes less reliable. These difficulties are further compounded by the need for reproducibility and parallelism. For reproducibility, the numbers generated to determine any outcome must be the same each time a simulation is run. However, the concurrency that comes with most parallelism introduces race conditions. To have both reproducibility and concurrency, separate RNG states must be tracked for each independently schedulable unit of simulation, forming independent random number streams. We propose an alternative to the stride-based parallel LCG seeding approach that scales more practically with increased concurrency and workload by generating seeds through hashing and allowing for repeated outputs. Data gathered from normality tests of tally results from simple MC transport benchmark calculations indicates that the proposed hash-based RNG does not significantly affect the tally result normality property as compared to the conventional stride-based RNG.
Accurate state estimation plays a critical role in ensuring the robust control of humanoid robots, particularly in the context of learning-based control policies for legged robots. However, there is a notable gap in analytical research concerning estimations. Therefore, we endeavor to further understand how various types of estimations influence the decision-making processes of policies. In this paper, we provide quantitative insight into the effectiveness of learned state estimations, employing saliency analysis to identify key estimation variables and optimize their combination for humanoid locomotion tasks. Evaluations assessing tracking precision and robustness are conducted on comparative groups of policies with varying estimation combinations in both simulated and real-world environments. Results validated that the proposed policy is capable of crossing the sim-to-real gap and demonstrating superior performance relative to alternative policy configurations.
Wearable augmented reality (AR) offers new ways for supporting the interaction between autonomous vehicles (AVs) and pedestrians due to its ability to integrate timely and contextually relevant data into the user's field of view. This article presents novel wearable AR concepts that assist crossing pedestrians in multi-vehicle scenarios where several AVs frequent the road from both directions. Three concepts with different communication approaches for signaling responses from multiple AVs to a crossing request, as well as a conventional pedestrian push button, were simulated and tested within a virtual reality environment. The results showed that wearable AR is a promising way to reduce crossing pedestrians' cognitive load when the design offers both individual AV responses and a clear signal to cross. The willingness of pedestrians to adopt a wearable AR solution, however, is subject to different factors, including costs, data privacy, technical defects, liability risks, maintenance duties, and form factors. We further found that all participants favored sending a crossing request to AVs rather than waiting for the vehicles to detect their intentions-pointing to an important gap and opportunity in the current AV-pedestrian interaction literature.
Many cyber-physical-human systems (CPHS) involve a human decision-maker who may receive recommendations from an artificial intelligence (AI) platform while holding the ultimate responsibility of making decisions. In such CPHS applications, the human decision-maker may depart from an optimal recommended decision and instead implement a different one for various reasons. In this letter, we develop a rigorous framework to overcome this challenge. In our framework, we consider that humans may deviate from AI recommendations as they perceive and interpret the system's state in a different way than the AI platform. We establish the structural properties of optimal recommendation strategies and develop an approximate human model (AHM) used by the AI. We provide theoretical bounds on the optimality gap that arises from an AHM and illustrate the efficacy of our results in a numerical example.
Collecting well-matched multimedia datasets is crucial for training cross-modal retrieval models. However, in real-world scenarios, massive multimodal data are harvested from the Internet, which inevitably contains Partially Mismatched Pairs (PMPs). Undoubtedly, such semantical irrelevant data will remarkably harm the cross-modal retrieval performance. Previous efforts tend to mitigate this problem by estimating a soft correspondence to down-weight the contribution of PMPs. In this paper, we aim to address this challenge from a new perspective: the potential semantic similarity among unpaired samples makes it possible to excavate useful knowledge from mismatched pairs. To achieve this, we propose L2RM, a general framework based on Optimal Transport (OT) that learns to rematch mismatched pairs. In detail, L2RM aims to generate refined alignments by seeking a minimal-cost transport plan across different modalities. To formalize the rematching idea in OT, first, we propose a self-supervised cost function that automatically learns from explicit similarity-cost mapping relation. Second, we present to model a partial OT problem while restricting the transport among false positives to further boost refined alignments. Extensive experiments on three benchmarks demonstrate our L2RM significantly improves the robustness against PMPs for existing models. The code is available at //github.com/hhc1997/L2RM.
It is believed that in knowledge distillation (KD), the role of the teacher is to provide an estimate for the unknown Bayes conditional probability distribution (BCPD) to be used in the student training process. Conventionally, this estimate is obtained by training the teacher using maximum log-likelihood (MLL) method. To improve this estimate for KD, in this paper we introduce the concept of conditional mutual information (CMI) into the estimation of BCPD and propose a novel estimator called the maximum CMI (MCMI) method. Specifically, in MCMI estimation, both the log-likelihood and CMI of the teacher are simultaneously maximized when the teacher is trained. Through Eigen-CAM, it is further shown that maximizing the teacher's CMI value allows the teacher to capture more contextual information in an image cluster. Via conducting a thorough set of experiments, we show that by employing a teacher trained via MCMI estimation rather than one trained via MLL estimation in various state-of-the-art KD frameworks, the student's classification accuracy consistently increases, with the gain of up to 3.32\%. This suggests that the teacher's BCPD estimate provided by MCMI method is more accurate than that provided by MLL method. In addition, we show that such improvements in the student's accuracy are more drastic in zero-shot and few-shot settings. Notably, the student's accuracy increases with the gain of up to 5.72\% when 5\% of the training samples are available to the student (few-shot), and increases from 0\% to as high as 84\% for an omitted class (zero-shot). The code is available at \url{//github.com/iclr2024mcmi/ICLRMCMI}.
With the extremely rapid advances in remote sensing (RS) technology, a great quantity of Earth observation (EO) data featuring considerable and complicated heterogeneity is readily available nowadays, which renders researchers an opportunity to tackle current geoscience applications in a fresh way. With the joint utilization of EO data, much research on multimodal RS data fusion has made tremendous progress in recent years, yet these developed traditional algorithms inevitably meet the performance bottleneck due to the lack of the ability to comprehensively analyse and interpret these strongly heterogeneous data. Hence, this non-negligible limitation further arouses an intense demand for an alternative tool with powerful processing competence. Deep learning (DL), as a cutting-edge technology, has witnessed remarkable breakthroughs in numerous computer vision tasks owing to its impressive ability in data representation and reconstruction. Naturally, it has been successfully applied to the field of multimodal RS data fusion, yielding great improvement compared with traditional methods. This survey aims to present a systematic overview in DL-based multimodal RS data fusion. More specifically, some essential knowledge about this topic is first given. Subsequently, a literature survey is conducted to analyse the trends of this field. Some prevalent sub-fields in the multimodal RS data fusion are then reviewed in terms of the to-be-fused data modalities, i.e., spatiospectral, spatiotemporal, light detection and ranging-optical, synthetic aperture radar-optical, and RS-Geospatial Big Data fusion. Furthermore, We collect and summarize some valuable resources for the sake of the development in multimodal RS data fusion. Finally, the remaining challenges and potential future directions are highlighted.
We present a large-scale study on unsupervised spatiotemporal representation learning from videos. With a unified perspective on four recent image-based frameworks, we study a simple objective that can easily generalize all these methods to space-time. Our objective encourages temporally-persistent features in the same video, and in spite of its simplicity, it works surprisingly well across: (i) different unsupervised frameworks, (ii) pre-training datasets, (iii) downstream datasets, and (iv) backbone architectures. We draw a series of intriguing observations from this study, e.g., we discover that encouraging long-spanned persistency can be effective even if the timespan is 60 seconds. In addition to state-of-the-art results in multiple benchmarks, we report a few promising cases in which unsupervised pre-training can outperform its supervised counterpart. Code is made available at //github.com/facebookresearch/SlowFast
Learning with limited data is a key challenge for visual recognition. Few-shot learning methods address this challenge by learning an instance embedding function from seen classes and apply the function to instances from unseen classes with limited labels. This style of transfer learning is task-agnostic: the embedding function is not learned optimally discriminative with respect to the unseen classes, where discerning among them is the target task. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to adapt the embedding model to the target classification task, yielding embeddings that are task-specific and are discriminative. To this end, we employ a type of self-attention mechanism called Transformer to transform the embeddings from task-agnostic to task-specific by focusing on relating instances from the test instances to the training instances in both seen and unseen classes. Our approach also extends to both transductive and generalized few-shot classification, two important settings that have essential use cases. We verify the effectiveness of our model on two standard benchmark few-shot classification datasets --- MiniImageNet and CUB, where our approach demonstrates state-of-the-art empirical performance.