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Due to the increasing size of integrated circuits (ICs), their design and optimization phases (i.e., computer-aided design, CAD) grow increasingly complex. At design time, a large design space needs to be explored to find an implementation that fulfills all specifications and then optimizes metrics like energy, area, delay, reliability, etc. At run time, a large configuration space needs to be searched to find the best set of parameters (e.g., voltage/frequency) to further optimize the system. Both spaces are infeasible for exhaustive search typically leading to heuristic optimization algorithms that find some tradeoff between design quality and computational overhead. Machine learning (ML) can build powerful models that have successfully been employed in related domains. In this survey, we categorize how ML may be used and is used for design-time and run-time optimization and exploration strategies of ICs. A metastudy of published techniques unveils areas in CAD that are well explored and underexplored with ML, as well as trends in the employed ML algorithms. We present a comprehensive categorization and summary of the state of the art on ML for CAD. Finally, we summarize the remaining challenges and promising open research directions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a study of the impact of two important parameters, moisture and aging of the oil/paper dielectric used as insulation in power transformers.The way in which these two parameters influence different parameters of the Frequency Domain Spectroscopy (FDS) measurements, is emphasized.Different FDS parameters were measured by varying the moisturecontent and the aging degree of the oil impregnated paper.The use of two types of neural networks for analysis of the results was necessary in order to help discriminating the impact of moisture and aging on the FDS measurements and, in some cases, to estimate the aging duration of the paper impregnated with oil. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper proposes a novel method for Virtual Metrology (VM) in plasma etch processes based on analysis of all time and wavelength samples of Optical Emission Spectroscopy (OES) signals. The new method flattens each OES signal into a single vector, after which Singular Value Decomposition (SVD) is performed on the matrix formed by vectors of flattened OES signals in the training dataset. Low rank SVD projections of flattened and standardized OES recordings served as inputs for Ridge Regression, Artificial Neural Network, and Random Forest based VM models. A VM study is then conducted on a dataset gathered from a major 300 mm wafer fabrication facility, showing that the use of newly proposed SVD-based OES features consistently outperformed benchmark VM model features. Additional analysis of feature importance performed based on the analytically tractable Ridge Regression VM model form demonstrated distinct time-frequency patterns of OES signal portions that were highly informative for prediction of relevant Critical Dimensions, clearly justifying the need to use the entire OES signals for VM. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The document is the table of contents for the August 2024 issue of the IEEE Transactions on Semiconductor Manufacturing. It includes a special section on the 2023 Advanced Semiconductor Manufacturing Conference, as well as regular issue papers on topics such as wafer-scale 3D integration, chemical uniformity impacts on electrodeposition, and thermal study of polymers for microelectronics. The document also includes letters and announcements, such as calls for papers and nominations for awards. [Extracted from the article]

This paper presents a novel framework to recover detailed avatar from a single image. It is a challenging task due to factors such as variations in human shapes, body poses, texture, and viewpoints. Prior methods typically attempt to recover the human body shape using a parametric-based template that lacks the surface details. As such resulting body shape appears to be without clothing. In this paper, we propose a novel learning-based framework that combines the robustness of the parametric model with the flexibility of free-form 3D deformation. We use the deep neural networks to refine the 3D shape in a Hierarchical Mesh Deformation (HMD) framework, utilizing the constraints from body joints, silhouettes, and per-pixel shading information. Our method can restore detailed human body shapes with complete textures beyond skinned models. Experiments demonstrate that our method has outperformed previous state-of-the-art approaches, achieving better accuracy in terms of both 2D IoU number and 3D metric distance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is known that the determination of the good-dice-in-bad-neighborhoods (GDBNs) has been regarded as an effective technique to reduce the value of the defect parts per million (DPPM) by identifying and rejecting the suspicious dice even though they are good in testing. Instead of examining eight immediate neighbors in a small-sized $3\times 3$ window or exploiting simple linear regression, a large-sized window can be used to recognize the broad-sighted neighborhoods and accurately infer the suspiciousness level for any given die. In this paper, the artificial neural networks (ANN)-based method can be proposed to solve the GDBN identification. Furthermore, two enhanced techniques can be further presented to improve the inference accuracy of the original ANN-based method by considering the variation of the time-dependent wafer patterns and the wafer-to-wafer relationship between two adjacent wafers. After applying the two enhanced techniques, the business profits can be improved in the new ANN-based method. Various experiments on two datasets clearly reveal the superiority of the proposed ANN-based method over the other existing methods. In addition to the reduction of the DPPM value, the new ANN-based method can achieve the 1.5X–2X better reduction in the cost of the return merchandise authorization (RMA). On the other hand, the experimental results show that the similar result can also be obtained in the other lower-yield products. By using the new ANN-based method, the relationships on bad dice cross wafers can be captured and the highly-accurate inference results can be simultaneously maintained. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper serves as a survey of recent advances in large margin training and its theoretical foundations, mostly for (nonlinear) deep neural networks (DNNs) that are probably the most prominent machine learning models for large-scale data in the community over the past decade. We generalize the formulation of classification margins from classical research to latest DNNs, summarize theoretical connections between the margin, network generalization, and robustness, and introduce recent efforts in enlarging the margins for DNNs comprehensively. Since the viewpoint of different methods is discrepant, we categorize them into groups for ease of comparison and discussion in the paper. Hopefully, our discussions and overview inspire new research work in the community that aim to improve the performance of DNNs, and we also point to directions where the large margin principle can be verified to provide theoretical evidence why certain regularizations for DNNs function well in practice. We managed to shorten the paper such that the crucial spirit of large margin learning and related methods are better emphasized. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) inspection has gradually replaced manual inspection of transmission tower, which produces many images. While it is laborious and time-consuming to manually analyze these images, there are also challenges in automatically detecting small-size defective components such as bolts in transmission tower images, due to problems including complex background, small size, and many similar objects of bolts. In this paper, by virtue of multi-scale features and context information, we propose a deep neural network named Camp-Net (Context Information and Multi-Scale Pyramid Network) to identify bolts defect in transmission tower images. First, multi-scale feature fusion combines deep features and shallow features in convolutional networks to detect small-size bolts. Second, context information fusion puts the information around bolts into the detection network to remove the disturbance of complex background and similar objects. An image dataset containing defective bolts and normal bolts is constructed for model training and testing. Experimental results show that bolts with loose pins and bolts without pins among fittings in transmission tower can be accurately identified with the proposed model. The Average Precision (AP) of defective bolts detection of this model can be 11.4% higher than that of the commonly used high performance model, Faster R-CNN. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The optimal scheduling of interfering links in a dense wireless network with full frequency reuse is a challenging task. The traditional method involves first estimating all the interfering channel strengths and then optimizing the scheduling based on the model. This model-based method is, however, resource intensive and computationally hard because channel estimation is expensive in dense networks; furthermore, finding even a locally optimal solution of the resulting optimization problem may be computationally complex. This paper shows that by using a deep learning approach, it is possible to bypass the channel estimation and to schedule links efficiently based solely on the geographic locations of the transmitters and the receivers due to the fact that in many propagation environments, the wireless channel strength is largely a function of the distance-dependent path-loss. This is accomplished by unsupervised training over randomly deployed networks and by using a novel neural network architecture that computes the geographic spatial convolutions of the interfering or interfered neighboring nodes along with subsequent multiple feedback stages to learn the optimum solution. The resulting neural network gives a near-optimal performance for sum-rate maximization and is capable of generalizing to larger deployment areas and to deployments of different link densities. Moreover, to provide fairness, this paper proposes a novel scheduling approach that utilizes the sum-rate optimal scheduling algorithm over judiciously chosen subsets of links for maximizing a proportional fairness objective over the network. The proposed approach shows highly competitive and generalizable network utility maximization results. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper proposes Value-Aware solid-state drive (SSD) with fast access speed and low power consumption by eliminating error-correcting code (ECC). Value-Aware SSD utilizes the error tolerance of image recognition application using a deep neural network (DNN) to enhance reliability. In a previous paper, which proposes Value-Aware SSD, fast ECC decoder is implemented and SSD is evaluated with the 32-bit floating-point data format. On the other hand, in this paper, the proposed Value-Aware SSD is analyzed with 32-bit and 8-bit fixed-point data format and achieves the higher reliability even without ECC by newly proposed two techniques, Critical Bit Error Reduction (CBER) and Middle & Lower Page Error Reduction (M&L-PER). CBER and M&L-PER are proposed for 32-bit and 8-bit data format of application, respectively. These techniques modulate the threshold voltage ($V_{\mathrm {TH}}$) distribution of memory cells by recognizing the importance of each stored bit. By proposed CBER, as much as 15% bit error rate (BER) of NAND flash is allowed while the application provides high image recognition accuracy. Even if bit precision is truncated to 8 bit, 3.9% BER is accepted by M&L-PER. The fast read access and low power consumption are realized because ECC is not required. Finally, this paper analyzes the Value-Aware techniques with 3-D multi-level cell (MLC) NAND flash to compare the effects for 3D-MLC and triple-level cell (TLC) NAND flash. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Resistive random access memory (ReRAM) is often considered as a strong candidate for storing the weights in non-von Neumann neuromorphic computing systems. This paper studies how nonideal memory characteristics, which include programing error, read fluctuation, and retention, affect the inference accuracy of the analog ReRAM neural networks by incorporating memory characteristics extracted from 1-Mb ReRAM into a simulated inference-only neural network. This paper also shows that the different layer in the network can tolerate different amount of such imperfects. We learned four key points: 1) the conductance range of memory with less relative fluctuation is preferred for designing the weight-conductance mapping; 2) the control of programing error is essential for high inference accuracy; 3) retention-induced conductance drift can be fatal to the neuromorphic system. A compensation scheme is proposed in this paper which can effectively recover the inference accuracy; and 4) for multilayer networks, avoiding weight errors in the front layers can help to maintain the inference accuracy by reducing calculation error which may otherwise accumulate and pass down the networks. The concepts and approaches of this paper can also be applied to evaluate other types of nonvolatile memories for artificial neural networks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Human beings tend to learn unknown knowledge in a gradual process, from the basic to the complex. Based on this point, we propose a progressive learning method for producing service strategies according to requests, with a hierarchical priori knowledge and reinforcement learning. Service strategy aims to guide how to perform home services and takes into consideration the relationship between actions and objects in home environment. In this paper, strategy generation is regarded as a text generation problem in question answering (QA). Firstly, a hierarchical priori knowledge with service-object correlation at the bottom and action-object correlation at the top is constructed to assist the understanding on the relationship of objects and actions in service strategies. Service-object correlation guides how to select proper objects with the correct order, while action-object correlation associates actions in strategies according to selected objects. Based on the hierarchical priori knowledge, a progressive learning method is proposed to make the model produce effective strategies with a sequential cognition, from service-object correlation (objects) to action-object correlation (actions). After that, reinforcement learning is employed to enhance the progressive guidance, by designing rewards in terms of the hierarchical priori knowledge. Finally, the proposed method is tested with both comparative experiments and ablation studies, and the experimental results demonstrate the superiority in producing comprehensive and logical strategies, indicating that the progressive learning method in our paper can further improve the QA performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates the output consensus control problem of uncertain second-order nonlinear multiagent systems with unknown nonlinear dead zone, where the communication networks can be described as a directed graph with a fixed topology. The control input in each follower is assumed to be subject to unknown nonlinear dead zone. By the function approximation capability of neural networks (NNs), a distributed adaptive NN-based controller is designed for each follower in the graph such that all the outputs of the followers can asymptotically synchronize to the output of the leader with synchronization errors being semiglobally uniformly ultimately bounded. Based on Lyapunov stability theory and algebraic graph theory, analysis is conducted on stability and parameter convergence of the proposed algorithm. Finally, an example is provided to validate the theoretical results. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The variety of arc fault induced by different load types makes residential series arc fault detection complicated and challengeable. This paper proposes a hybrid time and frequency analysis and fully connected neural network (HTFNN) based method to identify series ac arc fault. The HTFNN method recognizes samples state by broadly classifying them into resistive (Re) category, capacitive–inductive (CI) category, and switching (Sw) category according to the fundamental frequency components of series current. In each category, separate fully connected neural network (NN) with customized time and frequency indicators being the input is employed for fine class recognition and state identification. This method construction addresses the feature overlap among various cases by separate categories and enables suitable indicator selection within each category. Since the identification complexity in each category is cheaper than identifying all cases together, concise NNs are applied in this paper to reduce computing cost. The general accuracies of normal and arcing state identification in Re, CI, and Sw category are 99.64%, 100%, and 98.45%, respectively, based on 3950 test samples. Method comparison shows that HTFNN achieves higher detection precision at lower computational complexity for generalized load types. This paper also evaluates the feasibility of implementing the method in hardware for arc fault detection device application. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To accurately pour drinks into various containers is an essential skill for service robots. However, drink pouring is a dynamic process and difficult to model. Traditional deep imitation learning techniques for implementing autonomous robotic pouring have an inherent black-box effect and require a large amount of demonstration data for model training. To address these issues, an Explainable Hierarchical Imitation Learning (EHIL) method is proposed in this paper such that a robot can learn high-level general knowledge and execute low-level actions across multiple drink pouring scenarios. Moreover, with the EHIL method, a logical graph can be constructed for task execution, through which the decision-making process for action generation can be made explainable to users and the causes of failure can be traced out. Based on the logical graph, the framework is manipulable to achieve different targets while the adaptability to unseen scenarios can be achieved in an explainable manner. A series of experiments have been conducted to verify the effectiveness of the proposed method. Results indicate that EHIL outperforms the traditional behavior cloning method in terms of success rate, adaptability, manipulability, and explainability. Note to Practitioners—Pouring liquids is a common activity in people’s daily lives and all wet-lab industries. Drink pouring dynamic control is difficult to model, while the accurate perception of flow is challenging. To enable the robot to learn under unknown dynamics via observing the human demonstration, deep imitation learning can be used. To address the limitations of traditional deep neural networks, an Explainable Hierarchical Imitation Learning (EHIL) method is proposed in this paper. The proposed method enables the robot to learn a sequence of reasonable pouring phases for performing the task rather than simply execute the task via traditional behavior cloning. In this way, explainability and safety can be ensured. Manipulability can be achieved by reconstructing the logical graph. The target of this research is to obtain pouring dynamics via the learning method and realize the precise and quick pouring of drink from the source containers to various targeted containers with reliable performance, adaptability, manipulability, and explainability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To convey neural network architectures in publications, appropriate visualizations are of great importance. While most current deep learning papers contain such visualizations, these are usually handcrafted just before publication, which results in a lack of a common visual grammar, significant time investment, errors, and ambiguities. Current automatic network visualization tools focus on debugging the network itself and are not ideal for generating publication visualizations. Therefore, we present an approach to automate this process by translating network architectures specified in Keras into visualizations that can directly be embedded into any publication. To do so, we propose a visual grammar for convolutional neural networks (CNNs), which has been derived from an analysis of such figures extracted from all ICCV and CVPR papers published between 2013 and 2019. The proposed grammar incorporates visual encoding, network layout, layer aggregation, and legend generation. We have further realized our approach in an online system available to the community, which we have evaluated through expert feedback, and a quantitative study. It not only reduces the time needed to generate network visualizations for publications, but also enables a unified and unambiguous visualization design. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Network data in real-world tends to be error-prone due to incomplete sampling, imperfect measurements, etc.; this in turn results in inaccurate results when performing network analysis or modeling, such as node classification and link prediction, on these flawed networks. In this paper, we aim to reconstruct a reliable network from a flawed, undirected, unweighted network, a process referred to network enhancement. More specifically, network enhancement aims to detect the noisy links that are observed in the network but should not exist in the real world, as well as to predict the missing links that do indeed exist in the real world yet remain unobserved. While some attempts have been made to detect either noisy links or missing links, few of these works have considered unifying these two tasks, even though they are inter-dependent and capable of mutually boosting each others’ performance. In this paper, we therefore propose E-Net, an end-to-end graph neural network model, to leverage the mutual influence of these two tasks in order to achieve both goals more effectively. On one hand, detecting noisy links can benefit the performance of missing link prediction, while on the other hand, predicting missing links can provide indirect supervision for detecting noisy link detection when the labels of these noisy links are unavailable. Moreover, by proposing a subgraph extraction mechanism based on random walk with restart, the model can be scaled up to large networks and is able to preserve the local and global structural characteristics. The experimental results on several types of large networks demonstrate that the proposed model obtains an improvement of 10.7 percent on average in terms of F1 for predicting missing links, along with an average of 3.7 percent improvement in terms of precision for detecting noisy links compared with the state-of-the-art baselines. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we propose a new state representation method, called encoding sum and concatenation (ESC), to describe the environment observation for decision-making in autonomous driving. Unlike existing state representation methods, ESC is applicable to the situation where the number of surrounding vehicles is variable and eliminates the need for manually pre-designed sorting rules, leading to higher representation ability and generality. The proposed ESC method introduces a feature neural network (NN) to encode the real-valued feature of each surrounding vehicle into an encoding vector, and then adds these vectors up to obtain the representation vector of the set of surrounding vehicles. Then, a fixed-dimensional and permutation-invariance state representation can be obtained by concatenating the set representation with other variables, such as indicators of the ego vehicle and road. By introducing the sum-of-power mapping, this paper has further proved that the injectivity of the ESC state representation can be guaranteed if the output dimension of the feature NN is greater than the number of variables of all surrounding vehicles. This means that the ESC representation can be used to describe the environment and taken as the inputs of learning-based policy functions. Experiments demonstrate that compared with the fixed-permutation representation method, the policy learning accuracy based on ESC representation is improved by 62.2%. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A problem of image denoising, when images are corrupted by a non-stationary noise, is considered in this paper. Since, in practice, no a priori information on noise is available, noise statistics should be pre-estimated prior to image denoising. In this paper, deep convolutional neural network (CNN) based method for estimation of a map of local, patch-wise, standard deviations of noise (so-called sigma-map) is proposed. It achieves the state-of-the-art performance in accuracy of estimation of sigma-map for the case of non-stationary noise, as well as estimation of a noise variance for the case of an additive white Gaussian noise. Extensive experiments on image denoising using estimated sigma-maps demonstrate that our method outperforms recent CNN-based blind image denoising methods by up to 6 dB in PSNR, as well as other state-of-the-art methods based on sigma-map estimation by up to 0.5 dB, providing, at the same time, better usage flexibility. A comparison with the ideal case, when denoising is applied using ground-truth sigma-map, shows that a difference of corresponding PSNR values for the most of noise levels is within 0.1-0.2 dB, and does not exceed 0.6 dB. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper proposes to administer a multi-step artificial intelligence approach with an ensemble of adaptive neural networks (NNs) trained on 50000 samples to identify partial discharge (PD) diagnostic measurements for in-service medium voltage (MV) power cables. To evaluate the performance of the algorithm, a case study was performed on cables deliberately selected to contain both uncomplicated measurements and disruptive irregularities representative of conditions during field testing. Experimental test results prove that the proposed cable-specific adaptation improves PD identification accuracy, with further increment through the NN ensembles. The main contribution of the approach is in both the cable-specific adaption and the NN ensemble being applied to MV cable field measurements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is an opportunity in modern power systems to explore the demand flexibility by incentivizing consumers with dynamic prices. In this paper, we quantify demand flexibility using an efficient tool called time-varying elasticity, whose value may change depending on the prices and decision dynamics. This tool is particularly useful for evaluating the demand response potential and system reliability. Recent empirical evidences have highlighted some abnormal features when studying demand flexibility, such as delayed responses and vanishing elasticities after price spikes. Existing methods fail to capture these complicated features because they heavily rely on some predefined (often over-simplified) regression expressions. Instead, this paper proposes a model-free methodology to automatically and accurately derive the optimal estimation pattern. We further develop a two-stage estimation process with Siamese long short-term memory (LSTM) networks. Here, a LSTM network encodes the price response, while the other network estimates the time-varying elasticities. In the case study, the proposed framework and models are validated to achieve higher overall estimation accuracy and better description for various abnormal features when compared with the state-of-the-art methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper deals with the problem of controller design for normal nonlinear switched systems with unknown dynamics. The situation assumes that the nonlinear component of the system dynamics is unknown and there are extra uncertain terms and external perturbations affecting the system responses. Unlike previous methods that usually apply artificial neural networks to obtain an approximate model for an unknown dynamics, we use simple adaptive laws to surmount such fluctuations as well as to circumvent the steady state errors in the approaches provided by neural networks or fuzzy logics. No information on the bounds and parameters of the uncertain parts is needed. We design a twofold sliding mode control methodology to stabilize the whole switched system with arbitrary switching signals. To handle the consequences of the inherent chattering, a smooth integral type control signal is constructed. It is proved that once the system states attain the developed sliding manifold, the system becomes insensitive to both the lumped uncertainties and the dynamics of the switched system. The common assumption of a known Lyapunov functions for the subsystems is relaxed and the derived adaptive approach provides nonconservative circumstances for guaranteeing the global stability of the equilibrium state. The theoretical results of this paper are generalized for the canonical nonlinear systems with mismatched uncertainties and a novel adaptive sliding manifold is proposed to suppress the effects of the system mismatching uncertain parts. A comparative computer simulation is developed to examine the effective performance of the introduced controllers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Deep neural networks (DNNs), including convolutional neural networks (CNNs) and residual networks (ResNets) models, are able to learn abstract representations from the input data by considering a deep hierarchy of layers that perform advanced feature extraction. The combination of these models with visual attention techniques can assist with the identification of the most representative parts of the data from a visual standpoint, obtained through more detailed filtering of the features extracted by the operational layers of the network. This is of significant interest for analyzing remotely sensed hyperspectral images (HSIs), characterized by their very high spectral dimensionality. However, few efforts have been conducted in the literature in order to adapt visual attention methods to remotely sensed HSI data analysis. In this paper, we introduce a new visual attention-driven technique for the HSI classification. Specifically, we incorporate attention mechanisms to a ResNet in order to better characterize the spectral–spatial information contained in the data. Our newly proposed method calculates a mask that is applied to the features obtained by the network in order to identify the most desirable ones for classification purposes. Our experiments, conducted using four widely used HSI data sets, reveal that the proposed deep attention model provides competitive advantages in terms of classification accuracy when compared to other state-of-the-art methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper focuses on the shingled magnetic recording (SMR) as the recording system for further high-density hard disk drives. Previously, we applied a log-likelihood ratio (LLR) modulator to the low-density parity check coding and iterative decoding system in SMR to improve the decoding performance. In this paper, we propose a new LLR modulator using neural network. Furthermore, we clarify that the proposed LLR modulator using neural network realizes effective iterative decoding in a read/write channel with pattern-dependent medium noise. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]