Tiffany Yu

Tiffany Yu, Rye Stahle-Smith, Darssan Eswaramoorthi et al.

Graph-based accelerators have been widely adopted in symbolic data processing applications such as genomics, cybersecurity, and artificial intelligence. However, these systems often suffer from excessive memory usage and inefficiencies stemming from redundant graph structures. We present AutoSlim, a machine learning-based framework that leverages data-driven methods to prune automata graphs for hardware accelerators. Using features extracted from prior graph executions and a Random Forest classifier, AutoSlim identifies and removes low-impact nodes and edges. When applied to a Non-deterministic Finite Automata overlay architecture (NAPOLY+), AutoSlim reduces FPGA resource usage by up to 40%, with corresponding improvements in throughput and power efficiency. The framework includes a verification step to ensure functional equivalence after pruning and suggests promising directions for both hardware optimization and security.

Tiffany Yu, Rye Stahle-Smith, Darssan Eswaramoorthi et al.

Symbolic accelerators are increasingly used for symbolic data processing in domains such as genomics, NLP, and cybersecurity. However, these accelerators face scalability issues due to excessive memory use and routing complexity, especially when targeting a large set. We present AutoSlim, a machine learning-based graph simplification framework designed to reduce the complexity of symbolic accelerators built on Non-deterministic Finite Automata (NFA) deployed on FPGA-based overlays such as NAPOLY+. AutoSlim uses Random Forest classification to prune low-impact transitions based on edge scores and structural features, significantly reducing automata graph density while preserving semantic correctness. Unlike prior tools, AutoSlim targets automated score-aware simplification with weighted transitions, enabling efficient ranking-based sequence analysis. We evaluated data sets (1K to 64K nodes) in NAPOLY+ and conducted performance measurements including latency, throughput, and resource usage. AutoSlim achieves up to 40 percent reduction in FPGA LUTs and over 30 percent pruning in transitions, while scaling to graphs an order of magnitude larger than existing benchmarks. Our results also demonstrate how hardware interconnection (fanout) heavily influences hardware cost and that AutoSlim's pruning mitigates resource blowup.