Yungang Bao

Junyue Wang, Zhicheng Yao, Yan Pi et al.

Functional verification remains a critical bottleneck in modern IC development cycles, accounting for approximately 70% of total development time in many projects. However, traditional methods, including constrained-random and formal verification, struggle to keep pace with the growing complexity of modern semiconductor designs. While recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown promise in code generation and task automation, significant challenges hinder the realization of end-to-end functional verification automation. These challenges include (i) limited accuracy in generating Verilog/SystemVerilog verification code, (ii) the fragility of LLMs when executing complex, multi-step verification workflows, and (iii) the difficulty of maintaining verification consistency across specifications, coverage models, and test cases throughout the workflow. To address these challenges, we propose UCAgent, an end-to-end agent that automates hardware block-level functional verification based on three core mechanisms. First, we establish a pure Python verification environment using Picker and Toffee to avoid relying on LLM-generated SystemVerilog verification code. Second, we introduce a configurable 31-stage fine-grained verification workflow to guide the LLM, where each stage is verified by an automated checker. Furthermore, we propose a Verification Consistency Labeling Mechanism (VCLM) that assigns hierarchical labels to LLM-generated artifacts, improving the reliability and traceability of verification. Experimental results show that UCAgent can complete end-to-end automated verification on multiple modules, including the UART, FPU, and integer divider modules, achieving up to 98.5% code coverage and up to 100% functional coverage. UCAgent also discovers previously unidentified design defects in realistic designs, demonstrating its practical potential.

Yuan Xu, Tianwei Zhang, Yungang Bao

Robot apps are becoming more automated, complex and diverse. An app usually consists of many functions, interacting with each other and the environment. This allows robots to conduct various tasks. However, it also opens a new door for cyber attacks: adversaries can leverage these interactions to threaten the safety of robot operations. Unfortunately, this issue is rarely explored in past works. We present the first systematic investigation about the function interactions in common robot apps. First, we disclose the potential risks and damages caused by malicious interactions. We introduce a comprehensive graph to model the function interactions in robot apps by analyzing 3,100 packages from the Robot Operating System (ROS) platform. From this graph, we identify and categorize three types of interaction risks. Second, we propose RTron, a novel system to detect and mitigate these risks and protect the operations of robot apps. We introduce security policies for each type of risks, and design coordination nodes to enforce the policies and regulate the interactions. We conduct extensive experiments on 110 robot apps from the ROS platform and two complex apps (Baidu Apollo and Autoware) widely adopted in industry. Evaluation results indicated RTron can correctly identify and mitigate all potential risks with negligible performance cost. To validate the practicality of the risks and solutions, we implement and evaluate RTron on a physical UGV (Turtlebot) with real-word apps and environments.

Mengying Guo, Tao Yi, Yuqing Zhu et al.

Network embedding (NE) can generate succinct node representations for massive-scale networks and enable direct applications of common machine learning methods to the network structure. Various NE algorithms have been proposed and used in a number of applications, such as node classification and link prediction. NE algorithms typically contain hyperparameters that are key to performance, but the hyperparameter tuning process can be time consuming. It is desirable to have the hyperparameters tuned within a specified length of time. Although AutoML methods have been applied to the hyperparameter tuning of NE algorithms, the problem of how to tune hyperparameters in a given period of time is not studied for NE algorithms before. In this paper, we propose JITuNE, a just-in-time hyperparameter tuning framework for NE algorithms. Our JITuNE framework enables the time-constrained hyperparameter tuning for NE algorithms by employing the tuning over hierarchical network synopses and transferring the knowledge obtained on synopses to the whole network. The hierarchical generation of synopsis and a time-constrained tuning method enable the constraining of overall tuning time. Extensive experiments demonstrate that JITuNE can significantly improve performances of NE algorithms, outperforming state-of-the-art methods within the same number of algorithm runs.

Yuan Xu, Zhiyuan Yan, Sa Wang et al.

This paper envisions a scenario that hundreds of heterogeneous robots form a robotcenter which can be shared by multiple users and used like a single powerful robot to perform complex tasks. However, current multi-robot systems are either unable to manage heterogeneous robots or unable to support multiple concurrent users. Inspired by the design of modern datacenter OSes, we propose Avalon, a robot operating system with two-level scheduling scheme which is widely adopted in datacenters for Internet services and cloud computing. Specifically, Avalon integrates three important features together: (1) Instead of allocating a whole robot, Avalon classifies fine-grained robot resources into three categories to distinguish which fine-grained resources can be shared by multi-robot frameworks simultaneously. (2) Avalon adopts a location based resource allocation policy to substantially reduce scheduling overhead. (3) Avalon enables robots to offload computation intensive tasks to the clouds.We have implemented and evaluated Avalon on robots on both simulated environments and real world.

Yuqing Zhu, Jianxun Liu, Mengying Guo et al.

An ever increasing number of configuration parameters are provided to system users. But many users have used one configuration setting across different workloads, leaving untapped the performance potential of systems. A good configuration setting can greatly improve the performance of a deployed system under certain workloads. But with tens or hundreds of parameters, it becomes a highly costly task to decide which configuration setting leads to the best performance. While such task requires the strong expertise in both the system and the application, users commonly lack such expertise. To help users tap the performance potential of systems, we present BestConfig, a system for automatically finding a best configuration setting within a resource limit for a deployed system under a given application workload. BestConfig is designed with an extensible architecture to automate the configuration tuning for general systems. To tune system configurations within a resource limit, we propose the divide-and-diverge sampling method and the recursive bound-and-search algorithm. BestConfig can improve the throughput of Tomcat by 75%, that of Cassandra by 63%, that of MySQL by 430%, and reduce the running time of Hive join job by about 50% and that of Spark join job by about 80%, solely by configuration adjustment.