IncidentNet: Traffic Incident Detection, Localization and Severity Estimation with Sparse SensingSai Shashank Peddiraju, Kaustubh Harapanahalli, Edward Andert et al.
Prior art in traffic incident detection relies on high sensor coverage and is primarily based on decision-tree and random forest models that have limited representation capacity and, as a result, cannot detect incidents with high accuracy. This paper presents IncidentNet - a novel approach for classifying, localizing, and estimating the severity of traffic incidents using deep learning models trained on data captured from sparsely placed sensors in urban environments. Our model works on microscopic traffic data that can be collected using cameras installed at traffic intersections. Due to the unavailability of datasets that provide microscopic traffic details and traffic incident details simultaneously, we also present a methodology to generate a synthetic microscopic traffic dataset that matches given macroscopic traffic data. IncidentNet achieves a traffic incident detection rate of 98%, with false alarm rates of less than 7% in 197 seconds on average in urban environments with cameras on less than 20% of the traffic intersections.
1.2QUANT-PHOct 9, 2025
QuIRK: Quantum-Inspired Re-uploading KANVinayak Sharma, Ashish Padhy, Lord Sen et al.
Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks or KANs have shown the ability to outperform classical Deep Neural Networks, while using far fewer trainable parameters for regression problems on scientific domains. Even more powerful has been their interpretability due to their structure being composed of univariate B-Spline functions. This enables us to derive closed-form equations from trained KANs for a wide range of problems. This paper introduces a quantum-inspired variant of the KAN based on Quantum Data Re-uploading (DR) models. The Quantum-Inspired Re-uploading KAN or QuIRK model replaces B-Splines with single-qubit DR models as the univariate function approximator, allowing them to match or outperform traditional KANs while using even fewer parameters. This is especially apparent in the case of periodic functions. Additionally, since the model utilizes only single-qubit circuits, it remains classically tractable to simulate with straightforward GPU acceleration. Finally, we also demonstrate that QuIRK retains the interpretability advantages and the ability to produce closed-form solutions.
GiPH: Generalizable Placement Learning for Adaptive Heterogeneous ComputingYi Hu, Chaoran Zhang, Edward Andert et al.
Careful placement of a computational application within a target device cluster is critical for achieving low application completion time. The problem is challenging due to its NP-hardness and combinatorial nature. In recent years, learning-based approaches have been proposed to learn a placement policy that can be applied to unseen applications, motivated by the problem of placing a neural network across cloud servers. These approaches, however, generally assume the device cluster is fixed, which is not the case in mobile or edge computing settings, where heterogeneous devices move in and out of range for a particular application. We propose a new learning approach called GiPH, which learns policies that generalize to dynamic device clusters via 1) a novel graph representation gpNet that efficiently encodes the information needed for choosing a good placement, and 2) a scalable graph neural network (GNN) that learns a summary of the gpNet information. GiPH turns the placement problem into that of finding a sequence of placement improvements, learning a policy for selecting this sequence that scales to problems of arbitrary size. We evaluate GiPH with a wide range of task graphs and device clusters and show that our learned policy rapidly find good placements for new problem instances. GiPH finds placements with up to 30.5% lower completion times, searching up to 3X faster than other search-based placement policies.
17.3ARJul 2, 2020
Hardware Acceleration of Sparse and Irregular Tensor Computations of ML Models: A Survey and InsightsShail Dave, Riyadh Baghdadi, Tony Nowatzki et al.
Machine learning (ML) models are widely used in many important domains. For efficiently processing these computational- and memory-intensive applications, tensors of these over-parameterized models are compressed by leveraging sparsity, size reduction, and quantization of tensors. Unstructured sparsity and tensors with varying dimensions yield irregular computation, communication, and memory access patterns; processing them on hardware accelerators in a conventional manner does not inherently leverage acceleration opportunities. This paper provides a comprehensive survey on the efficient execution of sparse and irregular tensor computations of ML models on hardware accelerators. In particular, it discusses enhancement modules in the architecture design and the software support; categorizes different hardware designs and acceleration techniques and analyzes them in terms of hardware and execution costs; analyzes achievable accelerations for recent DNNs; highlights further opportunities in terms of hardware/software/model co-design optimizations (inter/intra-module). The takeaways from this paper include: understanding the key challenges in accelerating sparse, irregular-shaped, and quantized tensors; understanding enhancements in accelerator systems for supporting their efficient computations; analyzing trade-offs in opting for a specific design choice for encoding, storing, extracting, communicating, computing, and load-balancing the non-zeros; understanding how structured sparsity can improve storage efficiency and balance computations; understanding how to compile and map models with sparse tensors on the accelerators; understanding recent design trends for efficient accelerations and further opportunities.