Is AI Robust Enough for Scientific Research?

We uncover a phenomenon largely overlooked by the scientific community utilizing AI: neural networks exhibit high susceptibility to minute perturbations, resulting in significant deviations in their outputs. Through an analysis of five diverse application areas -- weather forecasting, chemical energy and force calculations, fluid dynamics, quantum chromodynamics, and wireless communication -- we demonstrate that this vulnerability is a broad and general characteristic of AI systems. This revelation exposes a hidden risk in relying on neural networks for essential scientific computations, calling further studies on their reliability and security.

EasyACIM: An End-to-End Automated Analog CIM with Synthesizable Architecture and Agile Design Space Exploration

Analog Computing-in-Memory (ACIM) is an emerging architecture to perform efficient AI edge computing. However, current ACIM designs usually have unscalable topology and still heavily rely on manual efforts. These drawbacks limit the ACIM application scenarios and lead to an undesired time-to-market. This work proposes an end-to-end automated ACIM based on a synthesizable architecture (EasyACIM). With a given array size and customized cell library, EasyACIM can generate layouts for ACIMs with various design specifications end-to-end automatically. Leveraging the multi-objective genetic algorithm (MOGA)-based design space explorer, EasyACIM can obtain high-quality ACIM solutions based on the proposed synthesizable architecture, targeting versatile application scenarios. The ACIM solutions given by EasyACIM have a wide design space and competitive performance compared to the state-of-the-art (SOTA) ACIMs.