Radhika Ghosal

Shvetank Prakash, Andrew Cheng, Jason Yik et al.

We introduce QuArch, a dataset of 1500 human-validated question-answer pairs designed to evaluate and enhance language models' understanding of computer architecture. The dataset covers areas including processor design, memory systems, and performance optimization. Our analysis highlights a significant performance gap: the best closed-source model achieves 84% accuracy, while the top small open-source model reaches 72%. We observe notable struggles in memory systems, interconnection networks, and benchmarking. Fine-tuning with QuArch improves small model accuracy by up to 8%, establishing a foundation for advancing AI-driven computer architecture research. The dataset and leaderboard are at https://harvard-edge.github.io/QuArch/.

Brian Plancher, Sabrina M. Neuman, Radhika Ghosal et al.

We introduce GRiD: a GPU-accelerated library for computing rigid body dynamics with analytical gradients. GRiD was designed to accelerate the nonlinear trajectory optimization subproblem used in state-of-the-art robotic planning, control, and machine learning, which requires tens to hundreds of naturally parallel computations of rigid body dynamics and their gradients at each iteration. GRiD leverages URDF parsing and code generation to deliver optimized dynamics kernels that not only expose GPU-friendly computational patterns, but also take advantage of both fine-grained parallelism within each computation and coarse-grained parallelism between computations. Through this approach, when performing multiple computations of rigid body dynamics algorithms, GRiD provides as much as a 7.2x speedup over a state-of-the-art, multi-threaded CPU implementation, and maintains as much as a 2.5x speedup when accounting for I/O overhead. We release GRiD as an open-source library for use by the wider robotics community.

Yu-Shun Hsiao, Zishen Wan, Tianyu Jia et al.

Safety and resilience are critical for autonomous unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). We introduce MAVFI, the micro aerial vehicles (MAVs) resilience analysis methodology to assess the effect of silent data corruption (SDC) on UAVs' mission metrics, such as flight time and success rate, for accurately measuring system resilience. To enhance the safety and resilience of robot systems bound by size, weight, and power (SWaP), we offer two low-overhead anomaly-based SDC detection and recovery algorithms based on Gaussian statistical models and autoencoder neural networks. Our anomaly error protection techniques are validated in numerous simulated environments. We demonstrate that the autoencoder-based technique can recover up to all failure cases in our studied scenarios with a computational overhead of no more than 0.0062%. Our application-aware resilience analysis framework, MAVFI, can be utilized to comprehensively test the resilience of other Robot Operating System (ROS)-based applications and is publicly available at https://github.com/harvard-edge/MAVBench/tree/mavfi.

Jason Jabbour, Dong-Ki Kim, Max Smith et al.

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have advanced robotic capabilities but remain challenging to deploy on resource-limited hardware. Pruning has enabled efficient compression of large language models (LLMs), yet it is largely understudied in robotics. Surprisingly, we observe that pruning VLA models leads to drastic degradation and increased safety violations. We introduce GLUESTICK, a post-pruning recovery method that restores much of the original model's functionality while retaining sparsity benefits. Our method performs a one-time interpolation between the dense and pruned models in weight-space to compute a corrective term. This correction is used during inference by each pruned layer to recover lost capabilities with minimal overhead. GLUESTICK requires no additional training, is agnostic to the pruning algorithm, and introduces a single hyperparameter that controls the tradeoff between efficiency and accuracy. Across diverse VLA architectures and tasks in manipulation and navigation, GLUESTICK achieves competitive memory efficiency while substantially recovering success rates and reducing safety violations. Additional material can be found at: https://gluestick-vla.github.io/.

Shvetank Prakash, Andrew Cheng, Arya Tschand et al.

The field of computer architecture, which bridges high-level software abstractions and low-level hardware implementations, remains absent from current large language model (LLM) evaluations. To this end, we present QuArch (pronounced 'quark'), the first benchmark designed to facilitate the development and evaluation of LLM knowledge and reasoning capabilities specifically in computer architecture. QuArch provides a comprehensive collection of 2,671 expert-validated question-answer (QA) pairs covering various aspects of computer architecture, including processor design, memory systems, and interconnection networks. Our evaluation reveals that while frontier models possess domain-specific knowledge, they struggle with skills that require higher-order thinking in computer architecture. Frontier model accuracies vary widely (from 34% to 72%) on these advanced questions, highlighting persistent gaps in architectural reasoning across analysis, design, and implementation QAs. By holistically assessing fundamental skills, QuArch provides a foundation for building and measuring LLM capabilities that can accelerate innovation in computing systems. With over 140 contributors from 40 institutions, this benchmark represents a community effort to set the standard for architectural reasoning in LLM evaluation.

Behzad Boroujerdian, Radhika Ghosal, Jonathan Cruz et al.

The limited onboard energy of autonomous mobile robots poses a tremendous challenge for practical deployment. Hence, efficient computing solutions are imperative. A crucial shortcoming of state-of-the-art computing solutions is that they ignore the robot's operating environment heterogeneity and make static, worst-case assumptions. As this heterogeneity impacts the system's computing payload, an optimal system must dynamically capture these changes in the environment and adjust its computational resources accordingly. This paper introduces RoboRun, a mobile-robot runtime that dynamically exploits the compute-environment synergy to improve performance and energy. We implement RoboRun in the Robot Operating System (ROS) and evaluate it on autonomous drones. We compare RoboRun against a state-of-the-art static design and show 4.5X and 4X improvements in mission time and energy, respectively, as well as a 36% reduction in CPU utilization.

Vijay Janapa Reddi, Brian Plancher, Susan Kennedy et al.

Broadening access to both computational and educational resources is critical to diffusing machine-learning (ML) innovation. However, today, most ML resources and experts are siloed in a few countries and organizations. In this paper, we describe our pedagogical approach to increasing access to applied ML through a massive open online course (MOOC) on Tiny Machine Learning (TinyML). We suggest that TinyML, ML on resource-constrained embedded devices, is an attractive means to widen access because TinyML both leverages low-cost and globally accessible hardware, and encourages the development of complete, self-contained applications, from data collection to deployment. To this end, a collaboration between academia (Harvard University) and industry (Google) produced a four-part MOOC that provides application-oriented instruction on how to develop solutions using TinyML. The series is openly available on the edX MOOC platform, has no prerequisites beyond basic programming, and is designed for learners from a global variety of backgrounds. It introduces pupils to real-world applications, ML algorithms, data-set engineering, and the ethical considerations of these technologies via hands-on programming and deployment of TinyML applications in both the cloud and their own microcontrollers. To facilitate continued learning, community building, and collaboration beyond the courses, we launched a standalone website, a forum, a chat, and an optional course-project competition. We also released the course materials publicly, hoping they will inspire the next generation of ML practitioners and educators and further broaden access to cutting-edge ML technologies.