Anirban Ghosh

Arya Tschand, Arun Tejusve Raghunath Rajan, Sachin Idgunji et al.

Rapid adoption of machine learning (ML) technologies has led to a surge in power consumption across diverse systems, from tiny IoT devices to massive datacenter clusters. Benchmarking the energy efficiency of these systems is crucial for optimization, but presents novel challenges due to the variety of hardware platforms, workload characteristics, and system-level interactions. This paper introduces MLPerf Power, a comprehensive benchmarking methodology with capabilities to evaluate the energy efficiency of ML systems at power levels ranging from microwatts to megawatts. Developed by a consortium of industry professionals from more than 20 organizations, MLPerf Power establishes rules and best practices to ensure comparability across diverse architectures. We use representative workloads from the MLPerf benchmark suite to collect 1,841 reproducible measurements from 60 systems across the entire range of ML deployment scales. Our analysis reveals trade-offs between performance, complexity, and energy efficiency across this wide range of systems, providing actionable insights for designing optimized ML solutions from the smallest edge devices to the largest cloud infrastructures. This work emphasizes the importance of energy efficiency as a key metric in the evaluation and comparison of the ML system, laying the foundation for future research in this critical area. We discuss the implications for developing sustainable AI solutions and standardizing energy efficiency benchmarking for ML systems.

Anirban Ghosh, Iliya Kulbaka, Ian Dahlin et al.

Point cloud-based object/place recognition remains a problem of interest in applications such as autonomous driving, scene reconstruction, and localization. Extracting a meaningful global descriptor from a query point cloud that can be matched with the descriptors of the database point clouds is a challenging problem. Furthermore, when the query point cloud is noisy or has been transformed (e.g., rotated), it adds to the complexity. To this end, we propose a novel methodology, named TopoRec, which utilizes Topological Data Analysis (TDA) for extracting local descriptors from a point cloud, thereby eliminating the need for resource-intensive GPU-based machine learning training. More specifically, we used the ATOL vectorization method to generate vectors for point clouds. To test the quality of the proposed TopoRec technique, we have implemented it on multiple real-world (e.g., Oxford RobotCar, NCLT) and realistic (e.g., ShapeNet) point cloud datasets for large-scale place and object recognition, respectively. Unlike existing learning-based approaches such as PointNetVLAD and PCAN, our method does not require extensive training, making it easily adaptable to new environments. Despite this, it consistently outperforms both state-of-the-art learning-based and handcrafted baselines (e.g., M2DP, ScanContext) on standard benchmark datasets, demonstrating superior accuracy and strong generalization.

Anirban Ghosh, Ayan Dutta

3D object classification is a crucial problem due to its significant practical relevance in many fields, including computer vision, robotics, and autonomous driving. Although deep learning methods applied to point clouds sampled on CAD models of the objects and/or captured by LiDAR or RGBD cameras have achieved remarkable success in recent years, achieving high classification accuracy remains a challenging problem due to the unordered point clouds and their irregularity and noise. To this end, we propose a novel state-of-the-art (SOTA) 3D object classification technique that combines topological data analysis with various image filtration techniques to classify objects when they are represented using point clouds. We transform every point cloud into a voxelized binary 3D image to extract distinguishing topological features. Next, we train a lightweight one-dimensional Convolutional Neural Network (1D CNN) using the extracted feature set from the training dataset. Our framework, TACO-Net, sets a new state-of-the-art by achieving $99.05\%$ and $99.52\%$ accuracy on the widely used synthetic benchmarks ModelNet40 and ModelNet10, and further demonstrates its robustness on the large-scale real-world OmniObject3D dataset. When tested with ten different kinds of corrupted ModelNet40 inputs, the proposed TACO-Net demonstrates strong resiliency overall.