Ali Jannesari

LG
h-index17
53papers
721citations
Novelty50%
AI Score59

53 Papers

3.4CLJul 10, 2024Code
Benchmarking LLMs for Environmental Review and Permitting

Rounak Meyur, Hung Phan, Koby Hayashi et al.

The National Environment Policy Act (NEPA) stands as a foundational piece of environmental legislation in the United States, requiring federal agencies to consider the environmental impacts of their proposed actions. The primary mechanism for achieving this is through the preparation of Environmental Assessments (EAs) and, for significant impacts, comprehensive Environmental Impact Statements (EIS). Large Language Model (LLM)s' effectiveness in specialized domains like NEPA remains untested for adoption in federal decision-making processes. To address this gap, we present NEPA Question and Answering Dataset (NEPAQuAD), the first comprehensive benchmark derived from EIS documents, along with a modular and transparent evaluation pipeline, MAPLE, to assess LLM performance on NEPA-focused regulatory reasoning tasks. Our benchmark leverages actual EIS documents to create diverse question types, ranging from factual to complex problem-solving ones. We built a modular and transparent evaluation pipeline to test both closed- and open-source models in zero-shot or context-driven QA benchmarks. We evaluate five state-of-the-art LLMs using our framework to assess both their prior knowledge and their ability to process NEPA-specific information. The experimental results reveal that all the models consistently achieve their highest performance when provided with the gold passage as context. While comparing the other context-driven approaches for each model, Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG)-based approaches substantially outperform PDF document contexts, indicating that neither model is well suited for long-context question-answering tasks. Our analysis suggests that NEPA-focused regulatory reasoning tasks pose a significant challenge for LLMs, particularly in terms of understanding the complex semantics and effectively processing the lengthy regulatory documents.

6.6LGNov 11, 2023Code
CompCodeVet: A Compiler-guided Validation and Enhancement Approach for Code Dataset

Le Chen, Arijit Bhattacharjee, Nesreen K. Ahmed et al.

Large language models (LLMs) have become increasingly prominent in academia and industry due to their remarkable performance in diverse applications. As these models evolve with increasing parameters, they excel in tasks like sentiment analysis and machine translation. However, even models with billions of parameters face challenges in tasks demanding multi-step reasoning. Code generation and comprehension, especially in C and C++, emerge as significant challenges. While LLMs trained on code datasets demonstrate competence in many tasks, they struggle with rectifying non-compilable C and C++ code. Our investigation attributes this subpar performance to two primary factors: the quality of the training dataset and the inherent complexity of the problem which demands intricate reasoning. Existing "Chain of Thought" (CoT) prompting techniques aim to enhance multi-step reasoning. This approach, however, retains the limitations associated with the latent drawbacks of LLMs. In this work, we propose CompCodeVet, a compiler-guided CoT approach to produce compilable code from non-compilable ones. Diverging from the conventional approach of utilizing larger LLMs, we employ compilers as a teacher to establish a more robust zero-shot thought process. The evaluation of CompCodeVet on two open-source code datasets shows that CompCodeVet has the ability to improve the training dataset quality for LLMs.

10.3PLJun 3
Beyond Code Pairs: Dialogue-Based Data Generation for LLM Code Translation

Le Chen, Nuo Xu, Winson Chen et al.

Large language models (LLMs) have shown remarkable capabilities in code translation, yet their performance deteriorates in low-resource programming domains such as Fortran and emerging frameworks like CUDA, where high-quality parallel data are scarce. We present an automated dataset generation pipeline featuring a dual-LLM Questioner-Solver design that incorporates external knowledge from compilers and runtime feedback. Beyond traditional source-target code pair datasets, our approach additionally generates (1) verified translations with unit tests for assessing functional consistency and (2) multi-turn dialogues that capture the reasoning process behind translation refinement. Applied to Fortran-to-C++ and C++-to-CUDA, the pipeline yields 3.64k and 3.93k dialogues, respectively. Fine-tuning on this data yields dramatic improvements in functional correctness, boosting unit test success rates by over 56% on the challenging C++-to-CUDA task. We show that the generated data enables a 7B open-weight model to significantly outperform larger proprietary systems on key metrics like compilation success.

9.2DCAug 16, 2022Code
Enhancing Heterogeneous Federated Learning with Knowledge Extraction and Multi-Model Fusion

Duy Phuong Nguyen, Sixing Yu, J. Pablo Muñoz et al.

Concerned with user data privacy, this paper presents a new federated learning (FL) method that trains machine learning models on edge devices without accessing sensitive data. Traditional FL methods, although privacy-protective, fail to manage model heterogeneity and incur high communication costs due to their reliance on aggregation methods. To address this limitation, we propose a resource-aware FL method that aggregates local knowledge from edge models and distills it into robust global knowledge through knowledge distillation. This method allows efficient multi-model knowledge fusion and the deployment of resource-aware models while preserving model heterogeneity. Our method improves communication cost and performance in heterogeneous data and models compared to existing FL algorithms. Notably, it reduces the communication cost of ResNet-32 by up to 50\% and VGG-11 by up to 10$\times$ while delivering superior performance.

8.0DCMar 1, 2022
Learning Intermediate Representations using Graph Neural Networks for NUMA and Prefetchers Optimization

Ali TehraniJamsaz, Mihail Popov, Akash Dutta et al.

There is a large space of NUMA and hardware prefetcher configurations that can significantly impact the performance of an application. Previous studies have demonstrated how a model can automatically select configurations based on the dynamic properties of the code to achieve speedups. This paper demonstrates how the static Intermediate Representation (IR) of the code can guide NUMA/prefetcher optimizations without the prohibitive cost of performance profiling. We propose a method to create a comprehensive dataset that includes a diverse set of intermediate representations along with optimum configurations. We then apply a graph neural network model in order to validate this dataset. We show that our static intermediate representation based model achieves 80% of the performance gains provided by expensive dynamic performance profiling based strategies. We further develop a hybrid model that uses both static and dynamic information. Our hybrid model achieves the same gains as the dynamic models but at a reduced cost by only profiling 30% of the programs.

2.0LGJan 25, 2023
Accelerating Domain-aware Deep Learning Models with Distributed Training

Aishwarya Sarkar, Chaoqun Lu, Ali Jannesari

Recent advances in data-generating techniques led to an explosive growth of geo-spatiotemporal data. In domains such as hydrology, ecology, and transportation, interpreting the complex underlying patterns of spatiotemporal interactions with the help of deep learning techniques hence becomes the need of the hour. However, applying deep learning techniques without domain-specific knowledge tends to provide sub-optimal prediction performance. Secondly, training such models on large-scale data requires extensive computational resources. To eliminate these challenges, we present a novel distributed domain-aware spatiotemporal network that utilizes domain-specific knowledge with improved model performance. Our network consists of a pixel-contribution block, a distributed multiheaded multichannel convolutional (CNN) spatial block, and a recurrent temporal block. We choose flood prediction in hydrology as a use case to test our proposed method. From our analysis, the network effectively predicts high peaks in discharge measurements at watershed outlets with up to 4.1x speedup and increased prediction performance of up to 93\%. Our approach achieved a 12.6x overall speedup and increased the mean prediction performance by 16\%. We perform extensive experiments on a dataset of 23 watersheds in a northern state of the U.S. and present our findings.

7.4SEJun 22, 2022
Heterogeneous Graph Neural Networks for Software Effort Estimation

Hung Phan, Ali Jannesari

Software effort can be measured by story point [35]. Current approaches for automatically estimating story points focus on applying pre-trained embedding models and deep learning for text regression to solve this problem which required expensive embedding models. We propose HeteroSP, a tool for estimating story points from textual input of Agile software project issues. We select GPT2SP [12] and Deep-SE [8] as the baselines for comparison. First, from the analysis of the story point dataset [8], we conclude that software issues are actually a mixture of natural language sentences with quoted code snippets and have problems related to large-size vocabulary. Second, we provide a module to normalize the input text including words and code tokens of the software issues. Third, we design an algorithm to convert an input software issue to a graph with different types of nodes and edges. Fourth, we construct a heterogeneous graph neural networks model with the support of fastText [6] for constructing initial node embedding to learn and predict the story points of new issues. We did the comparison over three scenarios of estimation, including within project, cross-project within the repository, and cross-project cross repository with our baseline approaches. We achieve the average Mean Absolute Error (MAE) as 2.38, 2.61, and 2.63 for three scenarios. We outperform GPT2SP in 2/3 of the scenarios while outperforming Deep-SE in the most challenging scenario with significantly less amount of running time. We also compare our approaches with different homogeneous graph neural network models and the results show that the heterogeneous graph neural networks model outperforms the homogeneous models in story point estimation. For time performance, we achieve about 570 seconds as the time performance in both three processes: node embedding initialization, model construction, and story point estimation.

6.6DCApr 25, 2023
Performance Optimization using Multimodal Modeling and Heterogeneous GNN

Akash Dutta, Jordi Alcaraz, Ali TehraniJamsaz et al.

Growing heterogeneity and configurability in HPC architectures has made auto-tuning applications and runtime parameters on these systems very complex. Users are presented with a multitude of options to configure parameters. In addition to application specific solutions, a common approach is to use general purpose search strategies, which often might not identify the best configurations or their time to convergence is a significant barrier. There is, thus, a need for a general purpose and efficient tuning approach that can be easily scaled and adapted to various tuning tasks. We propose a technique for tuning parallel code regions that is general enough to be adapted to multiple tasks. In this paper, we analyze IR-based programming models to make task-specific performance optimizations. To this end, we propose the Multimodal Graph Neural Network and Autoencoder (MGA) tuner, a multimodal deep learning based approach that adapts Heterogeneous Graph Neural Networks and Denoizing Autoencoders for modeling IR-based code representations that serve as separate modalities. This approach is used as part of our pipeline to model a syntax, semantics, and structure-aware IR-based code representation for tuning parallel code regions/kernels. We extensively experiment on OpenMP and OpenCL code regions/kernels obtained from PolyBench, Rodinia, STREAM, DataRaceBench, AMD SDK, NPB, NVIDIA SDK, Parboil, SHOC, and LULESH benchmarks. We apply our multimodal learning techniques to the tasks of i) optimizing the number of threads, scheduling policy and chunk size in OpenMP loops and, ii) identifying the best device for heterogeneous device mapping of OpenCL kernels. Our experiments show that this multimodal learning based approach outperforms the state-of-the-art in all experiments.

10.7LGSep 30, 2023
Bridging the Gap Between Foundation Models and Heterogeneous Federated Learning

Sixing Yu, J. Pablo Muñoz, Ali Jannesari

Federated learning (FL) offers privacy-preserving decentralized machine learning, optimizing models at edge clients without sharing private data. Simultaneously, foundation models (FMs) have gained traction in the artificial intelligence (AI) community due to their exceptional performance across various tasks. However, integrating FMs into FL presents challenges, primarily due to their substantial size and intensive resource requirements. This is especially true when considering the resource heterogeneity in edge FL systems. We present an adaptive framework for Resource-aware Federated Foundation Models (RaFFM) to address these challenges. RaFFM introduces specialized model compression algorithms tailored for FL scenarios, such as salient parameter prioritization and high-performance subnetwork extraction. These algorithms enable dynamic scaling of given transformer-based FMs to fit heterogeneous resource constraints at the network edge during both FL's optimization and deployment stages. Experimental results demonstrate that RaFFM shows significant superiority in resource utilization efficiency and uses fewer resources to deploy FMs to FL. Despite the lower resource consumption, target models optimized by RaFFM achieve performance on par with traditional FL methods applied to full-sized FMs. This is evident across tasks in both natural language processing and computer vision domains.

4.3DCFeb 22, 2023
Power Constrained Autotuning using Graph Neural Networks

Akash Dutta, Jee Choi, Ali Jannesari

Recent advances in multi and many-core processors have led to significant improvements in the performance of scientific computing applications. However, the addition of a large number of complex cores have also increased the overall power consumption, and power has become a first-order design constraint in modern processors. While we can limit power consumption by simply applying software-based power constraints, applying them blindly will lead to non-trivial performance degradation. To address the challenge of improving the performance, power, and energy efficiency of scientific applications on modern multi-core processors, we propose a novel Graph Neural Network based auto-tuning approach that (i) optimizes runtime performance at pre-defined power constraints, and (ii) simultaneously optimizes for runtime performance and energy efficiency by minimizing the energy-delay product. The key idea behind this approach lies in modeling parallel code regions as flow-aware code graphs to capture both semantic and structural code features. We demonstrate the efficacy of our approach by conducting an extensive evaluation on $30$ benchmarks and proxy-/mini-applications with $68$ OpenMP code regions. Our approach identifies OpenMP configurations at different power constraints that yield a geometric mean performance improvement of more than $25\%$ and $13\%$ over the default OpenMP configuration on a 32-core Skylake and a $16$-core Haswell processor respectively. In addition, when we optimize for the energy-delay product, the OpenMP configurations selected by our auto-tuner demonstrate both performance improvement of $21\%$ and $11\%$ and energy reduction of $29\%$ and $18\%$ over the default OpenMP configuration at Thermal Design Power for the same Skylake and Haswell processors, respectively.

4.3SEMar 6, 2022
Story Point Effort Estimation by Text Level Graph Neural Network

Hung Phan, Ali Jannesari

Estimating the software projects' efforts developed by agile methods is important for project managers or technical leads. It provides a summary as a first view of how many hours and developers are required to complete the tasks. There are research works on automatic predicting the software efforts, including Term Frequency Inverse Document Frequency (TFIDF) as the traditional approach for this problem. Graph Neural Network is a new approach that has been applied in Natural Language Processing for text classification. The advantages of Graph Neural Network are based on the ability to learn information via graph data structure, which has more representations such as the relationships between words compared to approaches of vectorizing sequence of words. In this paper, we show the potential and possible challenges of Graph Neural Network text classification in story point level estimation. By the experiments, we show that the GNN Text Level Classification can achieve as high accuracy as about 80 percent for story points level classification, which is comparable to the traditional approach. We also analyze the GNN approach and point out several current disadvantages that the GNN approach can improve for this problem or other problems in software engineering.

10.0CLJul 16, 2024
PipeInfer: Accelerating LLM Inference using Asynchronous Pipelined Speculation

Branden Butler, Sixing Yu, Arya Mazaheri et al.

Inference of Large Language Models (LLMs) across computer clusters has become a focal point of research in recent times, with many acceleration techniques taking inspiration from CPU speculative execution. These techniques reduce bottlenecks associated with memory bandwidth, but also increase end-to-end latency per inference run, requiring high speculation acceptance rates to improve performance. Combined with a variable rate of acceptance across tasks, speculative inference techniques can result in reduced performance. Additionally, pipeline-parallel designs require many user requests to maintain maximum utilization. As a remedy, we propose PipeInfer, a pipelined speculative acceleration technique to reduce inter-token latency and improve system utilization for single-request scenarios while also improving tolerance to low speculation acceptance rates and low-bandwidth interconnects. PipeInfer exhibits up to a 2.15$\times$ improvement in generation speed over standard speculative inference. PipeInfer achieves its improvement through Continuous Asynchronous Speculation and Early Inference Cancellation, the former improving latency and generation speed by running single-token inference simultaneously with several speculative runs, while the latter improves speed and latency by skipping the computation of invalidated runs, even in the middle of inference.

2.3DCApr 7, 2023
ParaGraph: Weighted Graph Representation for Performance Optimization of HPC Kernels

Ali TehraniJamsaz, Alok Mishra, Akash Dutta et al.

GPU-based HPC clusters are attracting more scientific application developers due to their extensive parallelism and energy efficiency. In order to achieve portability among a variety of multi/many core architectures, a popular choice for an application developer is to utilize directive-based parallel programming models, such as OpenMP. However, even with OpenMP, the developer must choose from among many strategies for exploiting a GPU or a CPU. Recently, Machine Learning (ML) approaches have brought significant advances in the optimizations of HPC applications. To this end, several ways have been proposed to represent application characteristics for ML models. However, the available techniques fail to capture features that are crucial for exposing parallelism. In this paper, we introduce a new graph-based program representation for parallel applications that extends the Abstract Syntax Tree to represent control and data flow information. The originality of this work lies in the addition of new edges exploiting the implicit ordering and parent-child relationships in ASTs, as well as the introduction of edge weights to account for loop and condition information. We evaluate our proposed representation by training a Graph Neural Network (GNN) to predict the runtime of an OpenMP code region across CPUs and GPUs. Various transformations utilizing collapse and data transfer between the CPU and GPU are used to construct the dataset. The predicted runtime of the model is used to determine which transformation provides the best performance. Results show that our approach is indeed effective and has normalized RMSE as low as 0.004 to at most 0.01 in its runtime predictions.

1.8LGDec 16, 2022
Addressing Data Heterogeneity in Decentralized Learning via Topological Pre-processing

Waqwoya Abebe, Ali Jannesari

Recently, local peer topology has been shown to influence the overall convergence of decentralized learning (DL) graphs in the presence of data heterogeneity. In this paper, we demonstrate the advantages of constructing a proxy-based locally heterogeneous DL topology to enhance convergence and maintain data privacy. In particular, we propose a novel peer clumping strategy to efficiently cluster peers before arranging them in a final training graph. By showing how locally heterogeneous graphs outperform locally homogeneous graphs of similar size and from the same global data distribution, we present a strong case for topological pre-processing. Moreover, we demonstrate the scalability of our approach by showing how the proposed topological pre-processing overhead remains small in large graphs while the performance gains get even more pronounced. Furthermore, we show the robustness of our approach in the presence of network partitions.

1.2DCNov 5, 2025
OMPILOT: Harnessing Transformer Models for Auto Parallelization to Shared Memory Computing Paradigms

Arijit Bhattacharjee, Ali TehraniJamsaz, Le Chen et al.

Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have significantly accelerated progress in code translation, enabling more accurate and efficient transformation across programming languages. While originally developed for natural language processing, LLMs have shown strong capabilities in modeling programming language syntax and semantics, outperforming traditional rule-based systems in both accuracy and flexibility. These models have streamlined cross-language conversion, reduced development overhead, and accelerated legacy code migration. In this paper, we introduce OMPILOT, a novel domain-specific encoder-decoder transformer tailored for translating C++ code into OpenMP, enabling effective shared-memory parallelization. OMPILOT leverages custom pre-training objectives that incorporate the semantics of parallel constructs and combines both unsupervised and supervised learning strategies to improve code translation robustness. Unlike previous work that focused primarily on loop-level transformations, OMPILOT operates at the function level to capture a wider semantic context. To evaluate our approach, we propose OMPBLEU, a novel composite metric specifically crafted to assess the correctness and quality of OpenMP parallel constructs, addressing limitations in conventional translation metrics.

8.7LGNov 9, 2022
Resource-Aware Heterogeneous Federated Learning using Neural Architecture Search

Sixing Yu, J. Pablo Muñoz, Ali Jannesari

Federated Learning (FL) is extensively used to train AI/ML models in distributed and privacy-preserving settings. Participant edge devices in FL systems typically contain non-independent and identically distributed (Non-IID) private data and unevenly distributed computational resources. Preserving user data privacy while optimizing AI/ML models in a heterogeneous federated network requires us to address data and system/resource heterogeneity. To address these challenges, we propose Resource-aware Federated Learning (RaFL). RaFL allocates resource-aware specialized models to edge devices using Neural Architecture Search (NAS) and allows heterogeneous model architecture deployment by knowledge extraction and fusion. Combining NAS and FL enables on-demand customized model deployment for resource-diverse edge devices. Furthermore, we propose a multi-model architecture fusion scheme allowing the aggregation of the distributed learning results. Results demonstrate RaFL's superior resource efficiency compared to SoTA.

1.2DCJul 2, 2024
MIREncoder: Multi-modal IR-based Pretrained Embeddings for Performance Optimizations

Akash Dutta, Ali Jannesari

One of the primary areas of interest in High Performance Computing is the improvement of performance of parallel workloads. Nowadays, compilable source code-based optimization tasks that employ deep learning often exploit LLVM Intermediate Representations (IRs) for extracting features from source code. Most such works target specific tasks, or are designed with a pre-defined set of heuristics. So far, pre-trained models are rare in this domain, but the possibilities have been widely discussed. Especially approaches mimicking large-language models (LLMs) have been proposed. But these have prohibitively large training costs. In this paper, we propose MIREncoder, a M}ulti-modal IR-based Auto-Encoder that can be pre-trained to generate a learned embedding space to be used for downstream tasks by machine learning-based approaches. A multi-modal approach enables us to better extract features from compilable programs. It allows us to better model code syntax, semantics and structure. For code-based performance optimizations, these features are very important while making optimization decisions. A pre-trained model/embedding implicitly enables the usage of transfer learning, and helps move away from task-specific trained models. Additionally, a pre-trained model used for downstream performance optimization should itself have reduced overhead, and be easily usable. These considerations have led us to propose a modeling approach that i) understands code semantics and structure, ii) enables use of transfer learning, and iii) is small and simple enough to be easily re-purposed or reused even with low resource availability. Our evaluations will show that our proposed approach can outperform the state of the art while reducing overhead.

6.4LGDec 27, 2024Code
Fortran2CPP: Automating Fortran-to-C++ Translation using LLMs via Multi-Turn Dialogue and Dual-Agent Integration

Le Chen, Bin Lei, Dunzhi Zhou et al.

Translating legacy Fortran code into C++ is a crucial step in modernizing high-performance computing (HPC) applications. However, the scarcity of high-quality, parallel Fortran-to-C++ datasets and the limited domain-specific expertise in large language models (LLMs) present significant challenges for automated translation. In this paper, we introduce Fortran2CPP, a multi-turn dialogue dataset generated by a novel LLM agent-based approach that integrates a dual-LLM Questioner-Solver module to enhance translation accuracy. Our dataset comprises 11.7k dialogues capturing iterative feedback-decision workflows including code translation, compilation, execution, unit testing, and error-fixing. Using this dataset, we fine-tune several open-weight LLMs and achieve up to a 3.31x improvement in CodeBLEU scores and a 92\% increase in compilation success rate, demonstrating enhanced syntactic accuracy and functional reliability. Our findings highlight the value of dialogue-based LLM training for complex code translation tasks. The dataset and model have been open-sourced and are available on our public GitHub repository\footnote{\url{https://github.com/HPC-Fortran2CPP/Fortran2Cpp}}.

16.5AIOct 31, 2025
VeriMoA: A Mixture-of-Agents Framework for Spec-to-HDL Generation

Heng Ping, Arijit Bhattacharjee, Peiyu Zhang et al.

Automation of Register Transfer Level (RTL) design can help developers meet increasing computational demands. Large Language Models (LLMs) show promise for Hardware Description Language (HDL) generation, but face challenges due to limited parametric knowledge and domain-specific constraints. While prompt engineering and fine-tuning have limitations in knowledge coverage and training costs, multi-agent architectures offer a training-free paradigm to enhance reasoning through collaborative generation. However, current multi-agent approaches suffer from two critical deficiencies: susceptibility to noise propagation and constrained reasoning space exploration. We propose VeriMoA, a training-free mixture-of-agents (MoA) framework with two synergistic innovations. First, a quality-guided caching mechanism to maintain all intermediate HDL outputs and enables quality-based ranking and selection across the entire generation process, encouraging knowledge accumulation over layers of reasoning. Second, a multi-path generation strategy that leverages C++ and Python as intermediate representations, decomposing specification-to-HDL translation into two-stage processes that exploit LLM fluency in high-resource languages while promoting solution diversity. Comprehensive experiments on VerilogEval 2.0 and RTLLM 2.0 benchmarks demonstrate that VeriMoA achieves 15--30% improvements in Pass@1 across diverse LLM backbones, especially enabling smaller models to match larger models and fine-tuned alternatives without requiring costly training.

11.4LGDec 12, 2025
GraphPerf-RT: A Graph-Driven Performance Model for Hardware-Aware Scheduling of OpenMP Codes

Mohammad Pivezhandi, Mahdi Banisharif, Saeed Bakhshan et al.

Autonomous AI agents on embedded platforms require real-time, risk-aware scheduling under resource and thermal constraints. Classical heuristics struggle with workload irregularity, tabular regressors discard structural information, and model-free reinforcement learning (RL) risks overheating. We introduce GraphPerf-RT, a graph neural network surrogate achieving deep learning accuracy at heuristic speeds (2-7ms). GraphPerf-RT is, to our knowledge, the first to unify task DAG topology, CFG-derived code semantics, and runtime context (per-core DVFS, thermal state, utilization) in a heterogeneous graph with typed edges encoding precedence, placement, and contention. Evidential regression with Normal-Inverse-Gamma priors provides calibrated uncertainty; we validate on makespan prediction for risk-aware scheduling. Experiments on three ARM platforms (Jetson TX2, Orin NX, RUBIK Pi) achieve R^2 = 0.81 on log-transformed makespan with Spearman rho = 0.95 and conservative uncertainty calibration (PICP = 99.9% at 95% confidence). Integration with four RL methods demonstrates that multi-agent model-based RL with GraphPerf-RT as the world model achieves 66% makespan reduction and 82% energy reduction versus model-free baselines, with zero thermal violations.

4.1LGSep 2, 2025Code
HydroGAT: Distributed Heterogeneous Graph Attention Transformer for Spatiotemporal Flood Prediction

Aishwarya Sarkar, Autrin Hakimi, Xiaoqiong Chen et al.

Accurate flood forecasting remains a challenge for water-resource management, as it demands modeling of local, time-varying runoff drivers (e.g., rainfall-induced peaks, baseflow trends) and complex spatial interactions across a river network. Traditional data-driven approaches, such as convolutional networks and sequence-based models, ignore topological information about the region. Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) propagate information exactly along the river network, which is ideal for learning hydrological routing. However, state-of-the-art GNN-based flood prediction models collapse pixels to coarse catchment polygons as the cost of training explodes with graph size and higher resolution. Furthermore, most existing methods treat spatial and temporal dependencies separately, either applying GNNs solely on spatial graphs or transformers purely on temporal sequences, thus failing to simultaneously capture spatiotemporal interactions critical for accurate flood prediction. We introduce a heterogenous basin graph where every land and river pixel is a node connected by physical hydrological flow directions and inter-catchment relationships. We propose HydroGAT, a spatiotemporal network that adaptively learns local temporal importance and the most influential upstream locations. Evaluated in two Midwestern US basins and across five baseline architectures, our model achieves higher NSE (up to 0.97), improved KGE (up to 0.96), and low bias (PBIAS within $\pm$5%) in hourly discharge prediction, while offering interpretable attention maps that reveal sparse, structured intercatchment influences. To support high-resolution basin-scale training, we develop a distributed data-parallel pipeline that scales efficiently up to 64 NVIDIA A100 GPUs on NERSC Perlmutter supercomputer, demonstrating up to 15x speedup across machines. Our code is available at https://github.com/swapp-lab/HydroGAT.

22.0LGFeb 3, 2024
The Landscape and Challenges of HPC Research and LLMs

Le Chen, Nesreen K. Ahmed, Akash Dutta et al.

Recently, language models (LMs), especially large language models (LLMs), have revolutionized the field of deep learning. Both encoder-decoder models and prompt-based techniques have shown immense potential for natural language processing and code-based tasks. Over the past several years, many research labs and institutions have invested heavily in high-performance computing, approaching or breaching exascale performance levels. In this paper, we posit that adapting and utilizing such language model-based techniques for tasks in high-performance computing (HPC) would be very beneficial. This study presents our reasoning behind the aforementioned position and highlights how existing ideas can be improved and adapted for HPC tasks.

16.8SEJan 28, 2024
OMPGPT: A Generative Pre-trained Transformer Model for OpenMP

Le Chen, Arijit Bhattacharjee, Nesreen Ahmed et al.

Large language models (LLMs)such as ChatGPT have significantly advanced the field of Natural Language Processing (NLP). This trend led to the development of code-based large language models such as StarCoder, WizardCoder, and CodeLlama, which are trained extensively on vast repositories of code and programming languages. While the generic abilities of these code LLMs are useful for many programmers in tasks like code generation, the area of high-performance computing (HPC) has a narrower set of requirements that make a smaller and more domain-specific model a smarter choice. This paper presents OMPGPT, a novel domain-specific model meticulously designed to harness the inherent strengths of language models for OpenMP pragma generation. Furthermore, we leverage prompt engineering techniques from the NLP domain to create Chain-of-OMP, an innovative strategy designed to enhance OMPGPT's effectiveness. Our extensive evaluations demonstrate that OMPGPT outperforms existing large language models specialized in OpenMP tasks and maintains a notably smaller size, aligning it more closely with the typical hardware constraints of HPC environments. We consider our contribution as a pivotal bridge, connecting the advantage of language models with the specific demands of HPC tasks.

18.8LGApr 12, 2024Code
FLoRA: Enhancing Vision-Language Models with Parameter-Efficient Federated Learning

Duy Phuong Nguyen, J. Pablo Munoz, Ali Jannesari

In the rapidly evolving field of artificial intelligence, multimodal models, e.g., integrating vision and language into visual-language models (VLMs), have become pivotal for many applications, ranging from image captioning to multimodal search engines. Among these models, the Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training (CLIP) model has demonstrated remarkable performance in understanding and generating nuanced relationships between text and images. However, the conventional training of such models often requires centralized aggregation of vast datasets, posing significant privacy and data governance challenges. To address these concerns, this paper proposes a novel approach that leverages Federated Learning and parameter-efficient adapters, i.e., Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA), to train VLMs. This methodology preserves data privacy by training models across decentralized data sources and ensures model adaptability and efficiency through LoRA's parameter-efficient fine-tuning. Our approach accelerates training time by up to 34.72 times and requires 2.47 times less memory usage than full fine-tuning.

14.9DCOct 27, 2024
CodeRosetta: Pushing the Boundaries of Unsupervised Code Translation for Parallel Programming

Ali TehraniJamsaz, Arijit Bhattacharjee, Le Chen et al.

Recent advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) have renewed interest in automatic programming language translation. Encoder-decoder transformer models, in particular, have shown promise in translating between different programming languages. However, translating between a language and its high-performance computing (HPC) extensions remains underexplored due to challenges such as complex parallel semantics. In this paper, we introduce CodeRosetta, an encoder-decoder transformer model designed specifically for translating between programming languages and their HPC extensions. CodeRosetta is evaluated on C++ to CUDA and Fortran to C++ translation tasks. It uses a customized learning framework with tailored pretraining and training objectives to effectively capture both code semantics and parallel structural nuances, enabling bidirectional translation. Our results show that CodeRosetta outperforms state-of-the-art baselines in C++ to CUDA translation by 2.9 BLEU and 1.72 CodeBLEU points while improving compilation accuracy by 6.05%. Compared to general closed-source LLMs, our method improves C++ to CUDA translation by 22.08 BLEU and 14.39 CodeBLEU, with 2.75% higher compilation accuracy. Finally, CodeRosetta exhibits proficiency in Fortran to parallel C++ translation, marking it, to our knowledge, as the first encoder-decoder model for this complex task, improving CodeBLEU by at least 4.63 points compared to closed-source and open-code LLMs.

5.1MTRL-SCIApr 9, 2024Code
SAM-I-Am: Semantic Boosting for Zero-shot Atomic-Scale Electron Micrograph Segmentation

Waqwoya Abebe, Jan Strube, Luanzheng Guo et al.

Image segmentation is a critical enabler for tasks ranging from medical diagnostics to autonomous driving. However, the correct segmentation semantics - where are boundaries located? what segments are logically similar? - change depending on the domain, such that state-of-the-art foundation models can generate meaningless and incorrect results. Moreover, in certain domains, fine-tuning and retraining techniques are infeasible: obtaining labels is costly and time-consuming; domain images (micrographs) can be exponentially diverse; and data sharing (for third-party retraining) is restricted. To enable rapid adaptation of the best segmentation technology, we propose the concept of semantic boosting: given a zero-shot foundation model, guide its segmentation and adjust results to match domain expectations. We apply semantic boosting to the Segment Anything Model (SAM) to obtain microstructure segmentation for transmission electron microscopy. Our booster, SAM-I-Am, extracts geometric and textural features of various intermediate masks to perform mask removal and mask merging operations. We demonstrate a zero-shot performance increase of (absolute) +21.35%, +12.6%, +5.27% in mean IoU, and a -9.91%, -18.42%, -4.06% drop in mean false positive masks across images of three difficulty classes over vanilla SAM (ViT-L).

10.2CVJan 15, 2025Code
SuperSAM: Crafting a SAM Supernetwork via Structured Pruning and Unstructured Parameter Prioritization

Waqwoya Abebe, Sadegh Jafari, Sixing Yu et al.

Neural Architecture Search (NAS) is a powerful approach of automating the design of efficient neural architectures. In contrast to traditional NAS methods, recently proposed one-shot NAS methods prove to be more efficient in performing NAS. One-shot NAS works by generating a singular weight-sharing supernetwork that acts as a search space (container) of subnetworks. Despite its achievements, designing the one-shot search space remains a major challenge. In this work we propose a search space design strategy for Vision Transformer (ViT)-based architectures. In particular, we convert the Segment Anything Model (SAM) into a weight-sharing supernetwork called SuperSAM. Our approach involves automating the search space design via layer-wise structured pruning and parameter prioritization. While the structured pruning applies probabilistic removal of certain transformer layers, parameter prioritization performs weight reordering and slicing of MLP-blocks in the remaining layers. We train supernetworks on several datasets using the sandwich rule. For deployment, we enhance subnetwork discovery by utilizing a program autotuner to identify efficient subnetworks within the search space. The resulting subnetworks are 30-70% smaller in size compared to the original pre-trained SAM ViT-B, yet outperform the pretrained model. Our work introduces a new and effective method for ViT NAS search-space design.

5.1DCOct 30, 2024Code
MassiveGNN: Efficient Training via Prefetching for Massively Connected Distributed Graphs

Aishwarya Sarkar, Sayan Ghosh, Nathan R. Tallent et al.

Graph Neural Networks (GNN) are indispensable in learning from graph-structured data, yet their rising computational costs, especially on massively connected graphs, pose significant challenges in terms of execution performance. To tackle this, distributed-memory solutions such as partitioning the graph to concurrently train multiple replicas of GNNs are in practice. However, approaches requiring a partitioned graph usually suffer from communication overhead and load imbalance, even under optimal partitioning and communication strategies due to irregularities in the neighborhood minibatch sampling. This paper proposes practical trade-offs for improving the sampling and communication overheads for representation learning on distributed graphs (using popular GraphSAGE architecture) by developing a parameterized continuous prefetch and eviction scheme on top of the state-of-the-art Amazon DistDGL distributed GNN framework, demonstrating about 15-40% improvement in end-to-end training performance on the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center's (NERSC) Perlmutter supercomputer for various OGB datasets.

3.8LGDec 29, 2023Code
LEFL: Low Entropy Client Sampling in Federated Learning

Waqwoya Abebe, Pablo Munoz, Ali Jannesari

Federated learning (FL) is a machine learning paradigm where multiple clients collaborate to optimize a single global model using their private data. The global model is maintained by a central server that orchestrates the FL training process through a series of training rounds. In each round, the server samples clients from a client pool before sending them its latest global model parameters for further optimization. Naive sampling strategies implement random client sampling and fail to factor client data distributions for privacy reasons. Hence we propose LEFL, an alternative sampling strategy by performing a one-time clustering of clients based on their model's learned high-level features while respecting data privacy. This enables the server to perform stratified client sampling across clusters in every round. We show datasets of sampled clients selected with this approach yield a low relative entropy with respect to the global data distribution. Consequently, the FL training becomes less noisy and significantly improves the convergence of the global model by as much as 7.4% in some experiments. Furthermore, it also significantly reduces the communication rounds required to achieve a target accuracy.

7.1LGJul 9, 2025
Leveraging Manifold Embeddings for Enhanced Graph Transformer Representations and Learning

Ankit Jyothish, Ali Jannesari

Graph transformers typically embed every node in a single Euclidean space, blurring heterogeneous topologies. We prepend a lightweight Riemannian mixture-of-experts layer that routes each node to various kinds of manifold, mixture of spherical, flat, hyperbolic - best matching its local structure. These projections provide intrinsic geometric explanations to the latent space. Inserted into a state-of-the-art ensemble graph transformer, this projector lifts accuracy by up to 3% on four node-classification benchmarks. The ensemble makes sure that both euclidean and non-euclidean features are captured. Explicit, geometry-aware projection thus sharpens predictive power while making graph representations more interpretable.

4.1LGMar 14, 2025Code
Enhanced Soups for Graph Neural Networks

Joseph Zuber, Aishwarya Sarkar, Joseph Jennings et al.

Graph Neural Networks (GNN) have demonstrated state-of-the-art performance in numerous scientific and high-performance computing (HPC) applications. Recent work suggests that "souping" (combining) individually trained GNNs into a single model can improve performance without increasing compute and memory costs during inference. However, existing souping algorithms are often slow and memory-intensive, which limits their scalability. We introduce Learned Souping for GNNs, a gradient-descent-based souping strategy that substantially reduces time and memory overhead compared to existing methods. Our approach is evaluated across multiple Open Graph Benchmark (OGB) datasets and GNN architectures, achieving up to 1.2% accuracy improvement and 2.1X speedup. Additionally, we propose Partition Learned Souping, a novel partition-based variant of learned souping that significantly reduces memory usage. On the ogbn-products dataset with GraphSAGE, partition learned souping achieves a 24.5X speedup and a 76% memory reduction without compromising accuracy.

3.7CVFeb 21, 2024
Unsupervised learning based object detection using Contrastive Learning

Chandan Kumar, Jansel Herrera-Gerena, John Just et al.

Training image-based object detectors presents formidable challenges, as it entails not only the complexities of object detection but also the added intricacies of precisely localizing objects within potentially diverse and noisy environments. However, the collection of imagery itself can often be straightforward; for instance, cameras mounted in vehicles can effortlessly capture vast amounts of data in various real-world scenarios. In light of this, we introduce a groundbreaking method for training single-stage object detectors through unsupervised/self-supervised learning. Our state-of-the-art approach has the potential to revolutionize the labeling process, substantially reducing the time and cost associated with manual annotation. Furthermore, it paves the way for previously unattainable research opportunities, particularly for large, diverse, and challenging datasets lacking extensive labels. In contrast to prevalent unsupervised learning methods that primarily target classification tasks, our approach takes on the unique challenge of object detection. We pioneer the concept of intra-image contrastive learning alongside inter-image counterparts, enabling the acquisition of crucial location information essential for object detection. The method adeptly learns and represents this location information, yielding informative heatmaps. Our results showcase an outstanding accuracy of \textbf{89.2\%}, marking a significant breakthrough of approximately \textbf{15x} over random initialization in the realm of unsupervised object detection within the field of computer vision.

9.4LGNov 28, 2025
PerfMamba: Performance Analysis and Pruning of Selective State Space Models

Abdullah Al Asif, Mobina Kashaniyan, Sixing Yu et al.

Recent advances in sequence modeling have introduced selective SSMs as promising alternatives to Transformer architectures, offering theoretical computational efficiency and sequence processing advantages. A comprehensive understanding of selective SSMs in runtime behavior, resource utilization patterns, and scaling characteristics still remains unexplored, thus obstructing their optimal deployment and further architectural improvements. This paper presents a thorough empirical study of Mamba-1 and Mamba-2, systematically profiled for performance to assess the design principles that contribute to their efficiency in state-space modeling. A detailed analysis of computation patterns, memory access, I/O characteristics, and scaling properties was performed for sequence lengths ranging from 64 to 16384 tokens. Our findings show that the SSM component, a central part of the selective SSM architecture, demands a significant portion of computational resources compared to other components in the Mamba block. Based on these insights, we propose a pruning technique that selectively removes low-activity states within the SSM component, achieving measurable throughput and memory gains while maintaining accuracy within a moderate pruning regime. This approach results in performance improvements across varying sequence lengths, achieving a 1.14x speedup and reducing memory usage by 11.50\%. These results offer valuable guidance for designing more efficient SSM architectures that can be applied to a wide range of real-world applications.

4.1LGSep 6, 2025
ProfilingAgent: Profiling-Guided Agentic Reasoning for Adaptive Model Optimization

Sadegh Jafari, Aishwarya Sarkar, Mohiuddin Bilwal et al.

Foundation models face growing compute and memory bottlenecks, hindering deployment on resource-limited platforms. While compression techniques such as pruning and quantization are widely used, most rely on uniform heuristics that ignore architectural and runtime heterogeneity. Profiling tools expose per-layer latency, memory, and compute cost, yet are rarely integrated into automated pipelines. We propose ProfilingAgent, a profiling-guided, agentic approach that uses large language models (LLMs) to automate compression via structured pruning and post-training dynamic quantization. Our modular multi-agent system reasons over static metrics (MACs, parameter counts) and dynamic signals (latency, memory) to design architecture-specific strategies. Unlike heuristic baselines, ProfilingAgent tailors layer-wise decisions to bottlenecks. Experiments on ImageNet-1K, CIFAR-10, and CIFAR-100 with ResNet-101, ViT-B/16, Swin-B, and DeiT-B/16 show pruning maintains competitive or improved accuracy (about 1% drop on ImageNet-1K, +2% gains for ViT-B/16 on smaller datasets), while quantization achieves up to 74% memory savings with <0.5% accuracy loss. Our quantization also yields consistent inference speedups of up to 1.74 times faster. Comparative studies with GPT-4o and GPT-4-Turbo highlight the importance of LLM reasoning quality for iterative pruning. These results establish agentic systems as scalable solutions for profiling-guided model optimization.

2.0CVMar 12, 2024
Learn and Search: An Elegant Technique for Object Lookup using Contrastive Learning

Chandan Kumar, Jansel Herrera-Gerena, John Just et al.

The rapid proliferation of digital content and the ever-growing need for precise object recognition and segmentation have driven the advancement of cutting-edge techniques in the field of object classification and segmentation. This paper introduces "Learn and Search", a novel approach for object lookup that leverages the power of contrastive learning to enhance the efficiency and effectiveness of retrieval systems. In this study, we present an elegant and innovative methodology that integrates deep learning principles and contrastive learning to tackle the challenges of object search. Our extensive experimentation reveals compelling results, with "Learn and Search" achieving superior Similarity Grid Accuracy, showcasing its efficacy in discerning regions of utmost similarity within an image relative to a cropped image. The seamless fusion of deep learning and contrastive learning to address the intricacies of object identification not only promises transformative applications in image recognition, recommendation systems, and content tagging but also revolutionizes content-based search and retrieval. The amalgamation of these techniques, as exemplified by "Learn and Search," represents a significant stride in the ongoing evolution of methodologies in the dynamic realm of object classification and segmentation.

4.3PLMay 31, 2023
PERFOGRAPH: A Numerical Aware Program Graph Representation for Performance Optimization and Program Analysis

Ali TehraniJamsaz, Quazi Ishtiaque Mahmud, Le Chen et al.

The remarkable growth and significant success of machine learning have expanded its applications into programming languages and program analysis. However, a key challenge in adopting the latest machine learning methods is the representation of programming languages, which directly impacts the ability of machine learning methods to reason about programs. The absence of numerical awareness, aggregate data structure information, and improper way of presenting variables in previous representation works have limited their performances. To overcome the limitations and challenges of current program representations, we propose a graph-based program representation called PERFOGRAPH. PERFOGRAPH can capture numerical information and the aggregate data structure by introducing new nodes and edges. Furthermore, we propose an adapted embedding method to incorporate numerical awareness. These enhancements make PERFOGRAPH a highly flexible and scalable representation that effectively captures programs intricate dependencies and semantics. Consequently, it serves as a powerful tool for various applications such as program analysis, performance optimization, and parallelism discovery. Our experimental results demonstrate that PERFOGRAPH outperforms existing representations and sets new state-of-the-art results by reducing the error rate by 7.4% (AMD dataset) and 10% (NVIDIA dataset) in the well-known Device Mapping challenge. It also sets new state-of-the-art results in various performance optimization tasks like Parallelism Discovery and NUMA and Prefetchers Configuration prediction.

36.5LGMay 19, 2023
Federated Foundation Models: Privacy-Preserving and Collaborative Learning for Large Models

Sixing Yu, J. Pablo Muñoz, Ali Jannesari

Foundation Models (FMs), such as LLaMA, BERT, GPT, ViT, and CLIP, have demonstrated remarkable success in a wide range of applications, driven by their ability to leverage vast amounts of data for pre-training. However, optimizing FMs often requires access to sensitive data, raising privacy concerns and limiting their applicability in many domains. In this paper, we propose the Federated Foundation Models (FFMs) paradigm, which combines the benefits of FMs and Federated Learning (FL) to enable privacy-preserving and collaborative learning across multiple end-users. We discuss the potential benefits and challenges of integrating FL into the lifespan of FMs, covering pre-training, fine-tuning, and application. We further outline potential future research avenues in FFM, including FFM pre-training, FFM fine-tuning, and federated prompt tuning, which allow the development of more personalized and context-aware models while ensuring data privacy. Moreover, we explore the possibility of continual/lifelong learning in FFMs, as increased computational power at the edge may unlock the potential for optimizing FMs using newly generated private data close to the data source. The proposed FFM concepts offer a flexible and scalable framework for training large language models in a privacy-preserving manner, setting the stage for subsequent advancements in both FM training and federated learning.

15.5LGMay 9, 2023Code
Learning to Parallelize with OpenMP by Augmented Heterogeneous AST Representation

Le Chen, Quazi Ishtiaque Mahmud, Hung Phan et al.

Detecting parallelizable code regions is a challenging task, even for experienced developers. Numerous recent studies have explored the use of machine learning for code analysis and program synthesis, including parallelization, in light of the success of machine learning in natural language processing. However, applying machine learning techniques to parallelism detection presents several challenges, such as the lack of an adequate dataset for training, an effective code representation with rich information, and a suitable machine learning model to learn the latent features of code for diverse analyses. To address these challenges, we propose a novel graph-based learning approach called Graph2Par that utilizes a heterogeneous augmented abstract syntax tree (Augmented-AST) representation for code. The proposed approach primarily focused on loop-level parallelization with OpenMP. Moreover, we create an OMP\_Serial dataset with 18598 parallelizable and 13972 non-parallelizable loops to train the machine learning models. Our results show that our proposed approach achieves the accuracy of parallelizable code region detection with 85\% accuracy and outperforms the state-of-the-art token-based machine learning approach. These results indicate that our approach is competitive with state-of-the-art tools and capable of handling loops with complex structures that other tools may overlook.

4.4SEMay 1, 2023
Redundancy and Concept Analysis for Code-trained Language Models

Arushi Sharma, Zefu Hu, Christopher Quinn et al.

Code-trained language models have proven to be highly effective for various code intelligence tasks. However, they can be challenging to train and deploy for many software engineering applications due to computational bottlenecks and memory constraints. Implementing effective strategies to address these issues requires a better understanding of these 'black box' models. In this paper, we perform the first neuron-level analysis for source code models to identify \textit{important} neurons within latent representations. We achieve this by eliminating neurons that are highly similar or irrelevant to the given task. This approach helps us understand which neurons and layers can be eliminated (redundancy analysis) and where important code properties are located within the network (concept analysis). Using redundancy analysis, we make observations relevant to knowledge transfer and model optimization applications. We find that over 95\% of the neurons are redundant with respect to our code intelligence tasks and can be eliminated without significant loss in accuracy. We also discover several subsets of neurons that can make predictions with baseline accuracy. Through concept analysis, we explore the traceability and distribution of human-recognizable concepts within latent code representations which could be used to influence model predictions. We trace individual and subsets of important neurons to specific code properties and identify 'number' neurons, 'string' neurons, and higher-level 'text' neurons for token-level tasks and higher-level concepts important for sentence-level downstream tasks. This also helps us understand how decomposable and transferable task-related features are and can help devise better techniques for transfer learning, model compression, and the decomposition of deep neural networks into modules.

3.7CVDec 1, 2021
CLAWS: Contrastive Learning with hard Attention and Weak Supervision

Jansel Herrera-Gerena, Ramakrishnan Sundareswaran, John Just et al.

Learning effective visual representations without human supervision is a long-standing problem in computer vision. Recent advances in self-supervised learning algorithms have utilized contrastive learning, with methods such as SimCLR, which applies a composition of augmentations to an image, and minimizes a contrastive loss between the two augmented images. In this paper, we present CLAWS, an annotation-efficient learning framework, addressing the problem of manually labeling large-scale agricultural datasets along with potential applications such as anomaly detection and plant growth analytics. CLAWS uses a network backbone inspired by SimCLR and weak supervision to investigate the effect of contrastive learning within class clusters. In addition, we inject a hard attention mask to the cropped input image before maximizing agreement between the image pairs using a contrastive loss function. This mask forces the network to focus on pertinent object features and ignore background features. We compare results between a supervised SimCLR and CLAWS using an agricultural dataset with 227,060 samples consisting of 11 different crop classes. Our experiments and extensive evaluations show that CLAWS achieves a competitive NMI score of 0.7325. Furthermore, CLAWS engenders the creation of low dimensional representations of very large datasets with minimal parameter tuning and forming well-defined clusters, which lends themselves to using efficient, transparent, and highly interpretable clustering methods such as Gaussian Mixture Models.

11.3LGNov 29, 2021Code
SPATL: Salient Parameter Aggregation and Transfer Learning for Heterogeneous Clients in Federated Learning

Sixing Yu, Phuong Nguyen, Waqwoya Abebe et al.

Federated learning~(FL) facilitates the training and deploying AI models on edge devices. Preserving user data privacy in FL introduces several challenges, including expensive communication costs, limited resources, and data heterogeneity. In this paper, we propose SPATL, an FL method that addresses these issues by: (a) introducing a salient parameter selection agent and communicating selected parameters only; (b) splitting a model into a shared encoder and a local predictor, and transferring its knowledge to heterogeneous clients via the locally customized predictor. Additionally, we leverage a gradient control mechanism to further speed up model convergence and increase robustness of training processes. Experiments demonstrate that SPATL reduces communication overhead, accelerates model inference, and enables stable training processes with better results compared to state-of-the-art methods. Our approach reduces communication cost by up to $86.45\%$, accelerates local inference by reducing up to $39.7\%$ FLOPs on VGG-11, and requires $7.4 \times$ less communication overhead when training ResNet-20.

3.1LGOct 2, 2021
Transfer Learning Approaches for Knowledge Discovery in Grid-based Geo-Spatiotemporal Data

Aishwarya Sarkar, Jien Zhang, Chaoqun Lu et al.

Extracting and meticulously analyzing geo-spatiotemporal features is crucial to recognize intricate underlying causes of natural events, such as floods. Limited evidence about hidden factors leading to climate change makes it challenging to predict regional water discharge accurately. In addition, the explosive growth in complex geo-spatiotemporal environment data that requires repeated learning by the state-of-the-art neural networks for every new region emphasizes the need for new computationally efficient methods, advanced computational resources, and extensive training on a massive amount of available monitored data. We, therefore, propose HydroDeep, an effectively reusable pretrained model to address this problem of transferring knowledge from one region to another by effectively capturing their intrinsic geo-spatiotemporal variance. Further, we present four transfer learning approaches on HydroDeep for spatiotemporal interpretability that improve Nash-Sutcliffe efficiency by 9% to 108% in new regions with a 95% reduction in time.

1.6LGSep 5, 2021Code
Temporal Shift Reinforcement Learning

Deepak George Thomas, Tichakorn Wongpiromsarn, Ali Jannesari

The function approximators employed by traditional image-based Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) algorithms usually lack a temporal learning component and instead focus on learning the spatial component. We propose a technique, Temporal Shift Reinforcement Learning (TSRL), wherein both temporal, as well as spatial components are jointly learned. Moreover, TSRL does not require additional parameters to perform temporal learning. We show that TSRL outperforms the commonly used frame stacking heuristic on both of the Atari environments we test on while beating the SOTA for one of them. This investigation has implications in the robotics as well as sequential decision-making domains.

9.2LGJun 13, 2021
Heterogeneous Federated Learning using Dynamic Model Pruning and Adaptive Gradient

Sixing Yu, Phuong Nguyen, Ali Anwar et al.

Federated Learning (FL) has emerged as a new paradigm for training machine learning models distributively without sacrificing data security and privacy. Learning models on edge devices such as mobile phones is one of the most common use cases for FL. However, Non-identical independent distributed~(non-IID) data in edge devices easily leads to training failures. Especially, over-parameterized machine learning models can easily be over-fitted on such data, hence, resulting in inefficient federated learning and poor model performance. To overcome the over-fitting issue, we proposed an adaptive dynamic pruning approach for FL, which can dynamically slim the model by dropping out unimportant parameters, hence, preventing over-fittings. Since the machine learning model's parameters react differently for different training samples, adaptive dynamic pruning will evaluate the salience of the model's parameter according to the input training sample, and only retain the salient parameter's gradients when doing back-propagation. We performed comprehensive experiments to evaluate our approach. The results show that our approach by removing the redundant parameters in neural networks can significantly reduce the over-fitting issue and greatly improves the training efficiency. In particular, when training the ResNet-32 on CIFAR-10, our approach reduces the communication cost by 57\%. We further demonstrate the inference acceleration capability of the proposed algorithm. Our approach reduces up to 50\% FLOPs inference of DNNs on edge devices while maintaining the model's quality.

12.1AIMar 11, 2021
A Vision Based Deep Reinforcement Learning Algorithm for UAV Obstacle Avoidance

Jeremy Roghair, Kyungtae Ko, Amir Ehsan Niaraki Asli et al.

Integration of reinforcement learning with unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) to achieve autonomous flight has been an active research area in recent years. An important part focuses on obstacle detection and avoidance for UAVs navigating through an environment. Exploration in an unseen environment can be tackled with Deep Q-Network (DQN). However, value exploration with uniform sampling of actions may lead to redundant states, where often the environments inherently bear sparse rewards. To resolve this, we present two techniques for improving exploration for UAV obstacle avoidance. The first is a convergence-based approach that uses convergence error to iterate through unexplored actions and temporal threshold to balance exploration and exploitation. The second is a guidance-based approach using a Domain Network which uses a Gaussian mixture distribution to compare previously seen states to a predicted next state in order to select the next action. Performance and evaluation of these approaches were implemented in multiple 3-D simulation environments, with variation in complexity. The proposed approach demonstrates a two-fold improvement in average rewards compared to state of the art.

17.2CVFeb 5, 2021Code
Topology-Aware Network Pruning using Multi-stage Graph Embedding and Reinforcement Learning

Sixing Yu, Arya Mazaheri, Ali Jannesari

Model compression is an essential technique for deploying deep neural networks (DNNs) on power and memory-constrained resources. However, existing model-compression methods often rely on human expertise and focus on parameters' local importance, ignoring the rich topology information within DNNs. In this paper, we propose a novel multi-stage graph embedding technique based on graph neural networks (GNNs) to identify DNN topologies and use reinforcement learning (RL) to find a suitable compression policy. We performed resource-constrained (i.e., FLOPs) channel pruning and compared our approach with state-of-the-art model compression methods. We evaluated our method on various models from typical to mobile-friendly networks, such as ResNet family, VGG-16, MobileNet-v1/v2, and ShuffleNet. Results show that our method can achieve higher compression ratios with a minimal fine-tuning cost yet yields outstanding and competitive performance.

14.7CVNov 25, 2020
Auto Graph Encoder-Decoder for Neural Network Pruning

Sixing Yu, Arya Mazaheri, Ali Jannesari

Model compression aims to deploy deep neural networks (DNN) on mobile devices with limited computing and storage resources. However, most of the existing model compression methods rely on manually defined rules, which require domain expertise. DNNs are essentially computational graphs, which contain rich structural information. In this paper, we aim to find a suitable compression policy from DNNs' structural information. We propose an automatic graph encoder-decoder model compression (AGMC) method combined with graph neural networks (GNN) and reinforcement learning (RL). We model the target DNN as a graph and use GNN to learn the DNN's embeddings automatically. We compared our method with rule-based DNN embedding model compression methods to show the effectiveness of our method. Results show that our learning-based DNN embedding achieves better performance and a higher compression ratio with fewer search steps. We evaluated our method on over-parameterized and mobile-friendly DNNs and compared our method with handcrafted and learning-based model compression approaches. On over parameterized DNNs, such as ResNet-56, our method outperformed handcrafted and learning-based methods with $4.36\%$ and $2.56\%$ higher accuracy, respectively. Furthermore, on MobileNet-v2, we achieved a higher compression ratio than state-of-the-art methods with just $0.93\%$ accuracy loss.

2.3LGOct 9, 2020
HydroDeep -- A Knowledge Guided Deep Neural Network for Geo-Spatiotemporal Data Analysis

Aishwarya Sarkar, Jien Zhang, Chaoqun Lu et al.

Due to limited evidence and complex causes of regional climate change, the confidence in predicting fluvial floods remains low. Understanding the fundamental mechanisms intrinsic to geo-spatiotemporal information is crucial to improve the prediction accuracy. This paper demonstrates a hybrid neural network architecture - HydroDeep, that couples a process-based hydro-ecological model with a combination of Deep Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) and Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) Network. HydroDeep outperforms the independent CNN's and LSTM's performance by 1.6% and 10.5% respectively in Nash-Sutcliffe efficiency. Also, we show that HydroDeep pre-trained in one region is adept at passing on its knowledge to distant places via unique transfer learning approaches that minimize HydroDeep's training duration for a new region by learning its regional geo-spatiotemporal features in a reduced number of iterations.

8.5LGAug 20, 2020
Static Neural Compiler Optimization via Deep Reinforcement Learning

Rahim Mammadli, Ali Jannesari, Felix Wolf

The phase-ordering problem of modern compilers has received a lot of attention from the research community over the years, yet remains largely unsolved. Various optimization sequences exposed to the user are manually designed by compiler developers. In designing such a sequence developers have to choose the set of optimization passes, their parameters and ordering within a sequence. Resulting sequences usually fall short of achieving optimal runtime for a given source code and may sometimes even degrade the performance when compared to unoptimized version. In this paper, we employ a deep reinforcement learning approach to the phase-ordering problem. Provided with sub-sequences constituting LLVM's O3 sequence, our agent learns to outperform the O3 sequence on the set of source codes used for training and achieves competitive performance on the validation set, gaining up to 1.32x speedup on previously-unseen programs. Notably, our approach differs from autotuning methods by not depending on one or more test runs of the program for making successful optimization decisions. It has no dependence on any dynamic feature, but only on the statically-attainable intermediate representation of the source code. We believe that the models trained using our approach can be integrated into modern compilers as neural optimization agents, at first to complement, and eventually replace the hand-crafted optimization sequences.

5.1SPSep 26, 2019
Visual Exploration and Energy-aware Path Planning via Reinforcement Learning

Amir Niaraki, Jeremy Roghair, Ali Jannesari

Visual exploration and smart data collection via autonomous vehicles is an attractive topic in various disciplines. Disturbances like wind significantly influence both the power consumption of the flying robots and the performance of the camera. We propose a reinforcement learning approach which combines the effects of the power consumption and the object detection modules to develop a policy for object detection in large areas with limited battery life. The learning model enables dynamic learning of the negative rewards of each action based on the drag forces that is resulted by the motion of the flying robot with respect to the wind field. The algorithm is implemented in a near-real world simulation environment both for the planar motion and flight in different altitudes. The trained agent often performed a trade-off between detecting the objects with high accuracy and increasing the area coverage within its battery life. The developed exploration policy outperformed the complete coverage algorithm by minimizing the traveled path while finding the target objects. The performance of the algorithms under various wind fields was evaluated in planar and 3D motion. During an exploration task with sparsely distributed goals and within a UAV's battery life, the proposed architecture could detect more than twice the amount of goal objects compared to the coverage path planning algorithm in moderate wind field. In high wind intensities, the energy-aware algorithm could detect 4 times the amount of goal objects when compared to its complete coverage counterpart.