Scaling Combinatorial Optimization Neural Improvement Heuristics with Online Search and Adaptation

We introduce Limited Rollout Beam Search (LRBS), a beam search strategy for deep reinforcement learning (DRL) based combinatorial optimization improvement heuristics. Utilizing pre-trained models on the Euclidean Traveling Salesperson Problem, LRBS significantly enhances both in-distribution performance and generalization to larger problem instances, achieving optimality gaps that outperform existing improvement heuristics and narrowing the gap with state-of-the-art constructive methods. We also extend our analysis to two pickup and delivery TSP variants to validate our results. Finally, we employ our search strategy for offline and online adaptation of the pre-trained improvement policy, leading to improved search performance and surpassing recent adaptive methods for constructive heuristics.

Effective Analog ICs Floorplanning with Relational Graph Neural Networks and Reinforcement Learning

Analog integrated circuit (IC) floorplanning is typically a manual process with the placement of components (devices and modules) planned by a layout engineer. This process is further complicated by the interdependence of floorplanning and routing steps, numerous electric and layout-dependent constraints, as well as the high level of customization expected in analog design. This paper presents a novel automatic floorplanning algorithm based on reinforcement learning. It is augmented by a relational graph convolutional neural network model for encoding circuit features and positional constraints. The combination of these two machine learning methods enables knowledge transfer across different circuit designs with distinct topologies and constraints, increasing the \emph{generalization ability} of the solution. Applied to $6$ industrial circuits, our approach surpassed established floorplanning techniques in terms of speed, area and half-perimeter wire length. When integrated into a \emph{procedural generator} for layout completion, overall layout time was reduced by $67.3\%$ with a $8.3\%$ mean area reduction compared to manual layout.

ResiDual Transformer Alignment with Spectral Decomposition

When examined through the lens of their residual streams, a puzzling property emerges in transformer networks: residual contributions (e.g., attention heads) sometimes specialize in specific tasks or input attributes. In this paper, we analyze this phenomenon in vision transformers, focusing on the spectral geometry of residuals, and explore its implications for modality alignment in vision-language models. First, we link it to the intrinsically low-dimensional structure of visual head representations, zooming into their principal components and showing that they encode specialized roles across a wide variety of input data distributions. Then, we analyze the effect of head specialization in multimodal models, focusing on how improved alignment between text and specialized heads impacts zero-shot classification performance. This specialization-performance link consistently holds across diverse pre-training data, network sizes, and objectives, demonstrating a powerful new mechanism for boosting zero-shot classification through targeted alignment. Ultimately, we translate these insights into actionable terms by introducing ResiDual, a technique for spectral alignment of the residual stream. Much like panning for gold, it lets the noise from irrelevant unit principal components (i.e., attributes) wash away to amplify task-relevant ones. Remarkably, this dual perspective on modality alignment yields fine-tuning level performances on different data distributions while modeling an extremely interpretable and parameter-efficient transformation, as we extensively show on more than 50 (pre-trained network, dataset) pairs.

Timeseria: an object-oriented time series processing library

Timeseria is an object-oriented time series processing library implemented in Python, which aims at making it easier to manipulate time series data and to build statistical and machine learning models on top of it. Unlike common data analysis frameworks, it builds up from well defined and reusable logical units (objects), which can be easily combined together in order to ensure a high level of consistency. Thanks to this approach, Timeseria can address by design several non-trivial issues often underestimated, such as handling data losses, non-uniform sampling rates, differences between aggregated data and punctual observations, time zones, daylight saving times, and more. Timeseria comes with a comprehensive set of base data structures, common data manipulation operations, and extensible models for data reconstruction, forecasting and anomaly detection. It also integrates a powerful plotting engine capable of handling even millions of data points.

Intrinsic Dimension Correlation: uncovering nonlinear connections in multimodal representations

To gain insight into the mechanisms behind machine learning methods, it is crucial to establish connections among the features describing data points. However, these correlations often exhibit a high-dimensional and strongly nonlinear nature, which makes them challenging to detect using standard methods. This paper exploits the entanglement between intrinsic dimensionality and correlation to propose a metric that quantifies the (potentially nonlinear) correlation between high-dimensional manifolds. We first validate our method on synthetic data in controlled environments, showcasing its advantages and drawbacks compared to existing techniques. Subsequently, we extend our analysis to large-scale applications in neural network representations. Specifically, we focus on latent representations of multimodal data, uncovering clear correlations between paired visual and textual embeddings, whereas existing methods struggle significantly in detecting similarity. Our results indicate the presence of highly nonlinear correlation patterns between latent manifolds.

Can you trust your explanations? A robustness test for feature attribution methods

The increase of legislative concerns towards the usage of Artificial Intelligence (AI) has recently led to a series of regulations striving for a more transparent, trustworthy and accountable AI. Along with these proposals, the field of Explainable AI (XAI) has seen a rapid growth but the usage of its techniques has at times led to unexpected results. The robustness of the approaches is, in fact, a key property often overlooked: it is necessary to evaluate the stability of an explanation (to random and adversarial perturbations) to ensure that the results are trustable. To this end, we propose a test to evaluate the robustness to non-adversarial perturbations and an ensemble approach to analyse more in depth the robustness of XAI methods applied to neural networks and tabular datasets. We will show how leveraging manifold hypothesis and ensemble approaches can be beneficial to an in-depth analysis of the robustness.

Fast ML-driven Analog Circuit Layout using Reinforcement Learning and Steiner Trees

This paper presents an artificial intelligence driven methodology to reduce the bottleneck often encountered in the analog ICs layout phase. We frame the floorplanning problem as a Markov Decision Process and leverage reinforcement learning for automatic placement generation under established topological constraints. Consequently, we introduce Steiner tree-based methods for the global routing step and generate guiding paths to be used to connect every circuit block. Finally, by integrating these solutions into a procedural generation framework, we present a unified pipeline that bridges the divide between circuit design and verification steps. Experimental results demonstrate the efficacy in generating complete layouts, eventually reducing runtimes to 1.5% compared to manual efforts.

stl2vec: Semantic and Interpretable Vector Representation of Temporal Logic

Integrating symbolic knowledge and data-driven learning algorithms is a longstanding challenge in Artificial Intelligence. Despite the recognized importance of this task, a notable gap exists due to the discreteness of symbolic representations and the continuous nature of machine-learning computations. One of the desired bridges between these two worlds would be to define semantically grounded vector representation (feature embedding) of logic formulae, thus enabling to perform continuous learning and optimization in the semantic space of formulae. We tackle this goal for knowledge expressed in Signal Temporal Logic (STL) and devise a method to compute continuous embeddings of formulae with several desirable properties: the embedding (i) is finite-dimensional, (ii) faithfully reflects the semantics of the formulae, (iii) does not require any learning but instead is defined from basic principles, (iv) is interpretable. Another significant contribution lies in demonstrating the efficacy of the approach in two tasks: learning model checking, where we predict the probability of requirements being satisfied in stochastic processes; and integrating the embeddings into a neuro-symbolic framework, to constrain the output of a deep-learning generative model to comply to a given logical specification.

Retrieval-Augmented Mining of Temporal Logic Specifications from Data

The integration of cyber-physical systems (CPS) into everyday life raises the critical necessity of ensuring their safety and reliability. An important step in this direction is requirement mining, i.e. inferring formally specified system properties from observed behaviors, in order to discover knowledge about the system. Signal Temporal Logic (STL) offers a concise yet expressive language for specifying requirements, particularly suited for CPS, where behaviors are typically represented as time series data. This work addresses the task of learning STL requirements from observed behaviors in a data-driven manner, focusing on binary classification, i.e. on inferring properties of the system which are able to discriminate between regular and anomalous behaviour, and that can be used both as classifiers and as monitors of the compliance of the CPS to desirable specifications. We present a novel framework that combines Bayesian Optimization (BO) and Information Retrieval (IR) techniques to simultaneously learn both the structure and the parameters of STL formulae, without restrictions on the STL grammar. Specifically, we propose a framework that leverages a dense vector database containing semantic-preserving continuous representations of millions of formulae, queried for facilitating the mining of requirements inside a BO loop. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach in several signal classification applications, showing its ability to extract interpretable insights from system executions and advance the state-of-the-art in requirement mining for CPS.

ECATS: Explainable-by-design concept-based anomaly detection for time series

Deep learning methods for time series have already reached excellent performances in both prediction and classification tasks, including anomaly detection. However, the complexity inherent in Cyber Physical Systems (CPS) creates a challenge when it comes to explainability methods. To overcome this inherent lack of interpretability, we propose ECATS, a concept-based neuro-symbolic architecture where concepts are represented as Signal Temporal Logic (STL) formulae. Leveraging kernel-based methods for STL, concept embeddings are learnt in an unsupervised manner through a cross-attention mechanism. The network makes class predictions through these concept embeddings, allowing for a meaningful explanation to be naturally extracted for each input. Our preliminary experiments with a simple CPS-based dataset show that our model is able to achieve great classification performance while ensuring local interpretability.