A survey on FPGA-based accelerator for ML models

This paper thoroughly surveys machine learning (ML) algorithms acceleration in hardware accelerators, focusing on Field-Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs). It reviews 287 out of 1138 papers from the past six years, sourced from four top FPGA conferences. Such selection underscores the increasing integration of ML and FPGA technologies and their mutual importance in technological advancement. Research clearly emphasises inference acceleration (81\%) compared to training acceleration (13\%). Additionally, the findings reveals that CNN dominates current FPGA acceleration research while emerging models like GNN show obvious growth trends. The categorization of the FPGA research papers reveals a wide range of topics, demonstrating the growing relevance of ML in FPGA research. This comprehensive analysis provides valuable insights into the current trends and future directions of FPGA research in the context of ML applications.

RoboMM: All-in-One Multimodal Large Model for Robotic Manipulation

In recent years, robotics has advanced significantly through the integration of larger models and large-scale datasets. However, challenges remain in applying these models to 3D spatial interactions and managing data collection costs. To address these issues, we propose the multimodal robotic manipulation model, RoboMM, along with the comprehensive dataset, RoboData. RoboMM enhances 3D perception through camera parameters and occupancy supervision. Building on OpenFlamingo, it incorporates Modality-Isolation-Mask and multimodal decoder blocks, improving modality fusion and fine-grained perception. RoboData offers the complete evaluation system by integrating several well-known datasets, achieving the first fusion of multi-view images, camera parameters, depth maps, and actions, and the space alignment facilitates comprehensive learning from diverse robotic datasets. Equipped with RoboData and the unified physical space, RoboMM is the generalist policy that enables simultaneous evaluation across all tasks within multiple datasets, rather than focusing on limited selection of data or tasks. Its design significantly enhances robotic manipulation performance, increasing the average sequence length on the CALVIN from 1.7 to 3.3 and ensuring cross-embodiment capabilities, achieving state-of-the-art results across multiple datasets.

DriveMM: All-in-One Large Multimodal Model for Autonomous Driving

Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) have demonstrated exceptional comprehension and interpretation capabilities in Autonomous Driving (AD) by incorporating large language models. Despite the advancements, current data-driven AD approaches tend to concentrate on a single dataset and specific tasks, neglecting their overall capabilities and ability to generalize. To bridge these gaps, we propose DriveMM, a general large multimodal model designed to process diverse data inputs, such as images and multi-view videos, while performing a broad spectrum of AD tasks, including perception, prediction, and planning. Initially, the model undergoes curriculum pre-training to process varied visual signals and perform basic visual comprehension and perception tasks. Subsequently, we augment and standardize various AD-related datasets to fine-tune the model, resulting in an all-in-one LMM for autonomous driving. To assess the general capabilities and generalization ability, we conduct evaluations on six public benchmarks and undertake zero-shot transfer on an unseen dataset, where DriveMM achieves state-of-the-art performance across all tasks. We hope DriveMM as a promising solution for future end-toend autonomous driving applications in the real world.

Towards Automated Model Design on Recommender Systems

The increasing popularity of deep learning models has created new opportunities for developing AI-based recommender systems. Designing recommender systems using deep neural networks requires careful architecture design, and further optimization demands extensive co-design efforts on jointly optimizing model architecture and hardware. Design automation, such as Automated Machine Learning (AutoML), is necessary to fully exploit the potential of recommender model design, including model choices and model-hardware co-design strategies. We introduce a novel paradigm that utilizes weight sharing to explore abundant solution spaces. Our paradigm creates a large supernet to search for optimal architectures and co-design strategies to address the challenges of data multi-modality and heterogeneity in the recommendation domain. From a model perspective, the supernet includes a variety of operators, dense connectivity, and dimension search options. From a co-design perspective, it encompasses versatile Processing-In-Memory (PIM) configurations to produce hardware-efficient models. Our solution space's scale, heterogeneity, and complexity pose several challenges, which we address by proposing various techniques for training and evaluating the supernet. Our crafted models show promising results on three Click-Through Rates (CTR) prediction benchmarks, outperforming both manually designed and AutoML-crafted models with state-of-the-art performance when focusing solely on architecture search. From a co-design perspective, we achieve 2x FLOPs efficiency, 1.8x energy efficiency, and 1.5x performance improvements in recommender models.

RoboCAS: A Benchmark for Robotic Manipulation in Complex Object Arrangement Scenarios

Foundation models hold significant potential for enabling robots to perform long-horizon general manipulation tasks. However, the simplicity of tasks and the uniformity of environments in existing benchmarks restrict their effective deployment in complex scenarios. To address this limitation, this paper introduces the \textit{RoboCAS} benchmark, the first benchmark specifically designed for complex object arrangement scenarios in robotic manipulation. This benchmark employs flexible and concise scripted policies to efficiently collect a diverse array of demonstrations, showcasing scattered, orderly, and stacked object arrangements within a highly realistic physical simulation environment. It includes complex processes such as target retrieval, obstacle clearance, and robot manipulation, testing agents' abilities to perform long-horizon planning for spatial reasoning and predicting chain reactions under ambiguous instructions. Extensive experiments on multiple baseline models reveal their limitations in managing complex object arrangement scenarios, underscoring the urgent need for intelligent agents capable of performing long-horizon operations in practical deployments and providing valuable insights for future research directions. Project website: \url{https://github.com/notFoundThisPerson/RoboCAS-v0}.

Corki: Enabling Real-time Embodied AI Robots via Algorithm-Architecture Co-Design

Embodied AI robots have the potential to fundamentally improve the way human beings live and manufacture. Continued progress in the burgeoning field of using large language models to control robots depends critically on an efficient computing substrate. In particular, today's computing systems for embodied AI robots are designed purely based on the interest of algorithm developers, where robot actions are divided into a discrete frame-basis. Such an execution pipeline creates high latency and energy consumption. This paper proposes Corki, an algorithm-architecture co-design framework for real-time embodied AI robot control. Our idea is to decouple LLM inference, robotic control and data communication in the embodied AI robots compute pipeline. Instead of predicting action for one single frame, Corki predicts the trajectory for the near future to reduce the frequency of LLM inference. The algorithm is coupled with a hardware that accelerates transforming trajectory into actual torque signals used to control robots and an execution pipeline that parallels data communication with computation. Corki largely reduces LLM inference frequency by up to 8.0x, resulting in up to 3.6x speed up. The success rate improvement can be up to 17.3%. Code is provided for re-implementation. https://github.com/hyy0613/Corki

MindBench: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Mind Map Structure Recognition and Analysis

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLM) have made significant progress in the field of document analysis. Despite this, existing benchmarks typically focus only on extracting text and simple layout information, neglecting the complex interactions between elements in structured documents such as mind maps and flowcharts. To address this issue, we introduce the new benchmark named MindBench, which not only includes meticulously constructed bilingual authentic or synthetic images, detailed annotations, evaluation metrics and baseline models, but also specifically designs five types of structured understanding and parsing tasks. These tasks include full parsing, partial parsing, position-related parsing, structured Visual Question Answering (VQA), and position-related VQA, covering key areas such as text recognition, spatial awareness, relationship discernment, and structured parsing. Extensive experimental results demonstrate the substantial potential and significant room for improvement in current models' ability to handle structured document information. We anticipate that the launch of MindBench will significantly advance research and application development in structured document analysis technology. MindBench is available at: https://miasanlei.github.io/MindBench.github.io/.

RoboUniView: Visual-Language Model with Unified View Representation for Robotic Manipulaiton

Utilizing Vision-Language Models (VLMs) for robotic manipulation represents a novel paradigm, aiming to enhance the model's ability to generalize to new objects and instructions. However, due to variations in camera specifications and mounting positions, existing methods exhibit significant performance disparities across different robotic platforms. To address this challenge, we propose RoboUniView in this paper, an innovative approach that decouples visual feature extraction from action learning. We first learn a unified view representation from multi-perspective views by pre-training on readily accessible data, and then derive actions from this unified view representation to control robotic manipulation. This unified view representation more accurately mirrors the physical world and is not constrained by the robotic platform's camera parameters. Thanks to this methodology, we achieve state-of-the-art performance on the demanding CALVIN benchmark, enhancing the success rate in the $D \to D$ setting from 88.7% to 96.2%, and in the $ABC \to D$ setting from 82.4% to 94.2%. Moreover, our model exhibits outstanding adaptability and flexibility: it maintains high performance under unseen camera parameters, can utilize multiple datasets with varying camera parameters, and is capable of joint cross-task learning across datasets. Code is provided for re-implementation. https://github.com/liufanfanlff/RoboUniview

A New Method in Facial Registration in Clinics Based on Structure Light Images

Background and Objective: In neurosurgery, fusing clinical images and depth images that can improve the information and details is beneficial to surgery. We found that the registration of face depth images was invalid frequently using existing methods. To abundant traditional image methods with depth information, a method in registering with depth images and traditional clinical images was investigated. Methods: We used the dlib library, a C++ library that could be used in face recognition, and recognized the key points on faces from the structure light camera and CT image. The two key point clouds were registered for coarse registration by the ICP method. Fine registration was finished after coarse registration by the ICP method. Results: RMSE after coarse and fine registration is as low as 0.995913 mm. Compared with traditional methods, it also takes less time. Conclusions: The new method successfully registered the facial depth image from structure light images and CT with a low error, and that would be promising and efficient in clinical application of neurosurgery.

Communication-Efficient Training Workload Balancing for Decentralized Multi-Agent Learning

Decentralized Multi-agent Learning (DML) enables collaborative model training while preserving data privacy. However, inherent heterogeneity in agents' resources (computation, communication, and task size) may lead to substantial variations in training time. This heterogeneity creates a bottleneck, lengthening the overall training time due to straggler effects and potentially wasting spare resources of faster agents. To minimize training time in heterogeneous environments, we present a Communication-Efficient Training Workload Balancing for Decentralized Multi-Agent Learning (ComDML), which balances the workload among agents through a decentralized approach. Leveraging local-loss split training, ComDML enables parallel updates, where slower agents offload part of their workload to faster agents. To minimize the overall training time, ComDML optimizes the workload balancing by jointly considering the communication and computation capacities of agents, which hinges upon integer programming. A dynamic decentralized pairing scheduler is developed to efficiently pair agents and determine optimal offloading amounts. We prove that in ComDML, both slower and faster agents' models converge, for convex and non-convex functions. Furthermore, extensive experimental results on popular datasets (CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, and CINIC-10) and their non-I.I.D. variants, with large models such as ResNet-56 and ResNet-110, demonstrate that ComDML can significantly reduce the overall training time while maintaining model accuracy, compared to state-of-the-art methods. ComDML demonstrates robustness in heterogeneous environments, and privacy measures can be seamlessly integrated for enhanced data protection.