Ziheng Xiao

Runzhen Xue, Hao Wu, Mingyu Yan et al.

Cross-workload design space exploration (DSE) is crucial in CPU architecture design. Existing DSE methods typically employ the transfer learning technique to leverage knowledge from source workloads, aiming to minimize the requirement of target workload simulation. However, these methods struggle with overfitting, data ambiguity, and workload dissimilarity. To address these challenges, we reframe the cross-workload CPU DSE task as a few-shot meta-learning problem and further introduce MetaDSE. By leveraging model agnostic meta-learning, MetaDSE swiftly adapts to new target workloads, greatly enhancing the efficiency of cross-workload CPU DSE. Additionally, MetaDSE introduces a novel knowledge transfer method called the workload-adaptive architectural mask algorithm, which uncovers the inherent properties of the architecture. Experiments on SPEC CPU 2017 demonstrate that MetaDSE significantly reduces prediction error by 44.3\% compared to the state-of-the-art. MetaDSE is open-sourced and available at this \href{https://anonymous.4open.science/r/Meta_DSE-02F8}{anonymous GitHub.}

Runzhen Xue, Hao Wu, Mingyu Yan et al.

Design Space Exploration (DSE) is essential to modern CPU design, yet current frameworks struggle to scale and generalize in high-dimensional architectural spaces. As the dimensionality of design spaces continues to grow, existing DSE frameworks face three fundamental challenges: (1) reduced accuracy and poor scalability of surrogate models in large design spaces; (2) inefficient acquisition guided by hand-crafted heuristics or exhaustive search; (3) limited interpretability, making it hard to pinpoint architectural bottlenecks. In this work, we present \textbf{AttentionDSE}, the first end-to-end DSE framework that \emph{natively integrates} performance prediction and design guidance through an attention-based neural architecture. Unlike traditional DSE workflows that separate surrogate modeling from acquisition and rely heavily on hand-crafted heuristics, AttentionDSE establishes a unified, learning-driven optimization loop, in which attention weights serve a dual role: enabling accurate performance estimation and simultaneously exposing the performance bottleneck. This paradigm shift elevates attention from a passive representation mechanism to an active, interpretable driver of design decision-making. Key innovations include: (1) a \textbf{Perception-Driven Attention} mechanism that exploits architectural hierarchy and locality, scaling attention complexity from $\mathcal{O}(n^2)$ to $\mathcal{O}(n)$ via sliding windows; (2) an \textbf{Attention-aware Bottleneck Analysis} that automatically surfaces critical parameters for targeted optimization, eliminating the need for domain-specific heuristics. Evaluated on high-dimensional CPU design space using the SPEC CPU2017 benchmark suite, AttentionDSE achieves up to \textbf{3.9\% higher Pareto Hypervolume} and over \textbf{80\% reduction in exploration time} compared to state-of-the-art baselines.