Deep Learning for Logic Optimization Algorithms, 2018 IEEE International Symposium on Circuits and Systems (ISCAS)

The slowing down of Moore's law and the emergence of new technologies puts an increasing pressure on the field of EDA. There is a constant need to improve optimization algorithms. However, finding and implementing such algorithms is a difficult task, especially with the novel logic primitives and potentially unconventional requirements of emerging technologies. In this paper, we cast logic optimization as a deterministic Markov decision process (MDP). We then take advantage of recent advances in deep reinforcement learning to build a system that learns how to navigate this process. Our design has a number of desirable properties. It is autonomous because it learns automatically and does not require human intervention. It generalizes to large functions after training on small examples. Additionally, it intrinsically supports both single- and multi-output functions, without the need to handle special cases. Finally, it is generic because the same algorithm can be used to achieve different optimization objectives, e.g., size and depth.

Deep Learning for Logic Optimization Algorithms

Edo Collins, Giovanni De Micheli, Winston Jason Haaswijk, Frédéric Kaplan, Benoît Laurent Auguste Seguin, Mathias Soeken, Sabine Süsstrunk

The slowing down of Moore's law and the emergence of new technologies puts an increasing pressure on the field of EDA. There is a constant need to improve optimization algorithms. However, finding and implementing such algorithms is a difficult task, especially with the novel logic primitives and potentially unconventional requirements of emerging technologies. In this paper, we cast logic optimization as a deterministic Markov decision process (MDP). We then take advantage of recent advances in deep reinforcement learning to build a system that learns how to navigate this process. Our design has a number of desirable properties. It is autonomous because it learns automatically and does not require human intervention. It generalizes to large functions after training on small examples. Additionally, it intrinsically supports both single-and multioutput functions, without the need to handle special cases. Finally, it is generic because the same algorithm can be used to achieve different optimization objectives, e. g., size and depth.

IEEE2018

Mean-Field methods for Structured Deep-Learning in Computer Vision

Pierre Bruno Baqué

In recent years, Machine Learning based Computer Vision techniques made impressive progress. These algorithms proved particularly efficient for image classification or detection of isolated objects. From a probabilistic perspective, these methods can predict marginals, over single or multiple variables, independently, with high accuracy. However, in many tasks of practical interest, we need to predict jointly several correlated variables. Practical applications include people detection in crowded scenes, image segmentation, surface reconstruction, 3D pose estimation and others. A large part of the research effort in today's computer-vision community aims at finding task-specific solutions to these problems, while leveraging the power of Deep-Learning based classifiers. In this thesis, we present our journey towards a generic and practical solution based on mean-field (MF) inference. Mean-field is a Statistical Physics-inspired method which has long been used in Computer-Vision as a variational approximation to posterior distributions over complex Conditional Random Fields. Standard mean-field optimization is based on coordinate descent and in many situations can be impractical. We therefore propose a novel proximal gradient-based approach to optimizing the variational objective. It is naturally parallelizable and easy to implement. We prove its convergence, and then demonstrate that, in practice, it yields faster convergence and often finds better optima than more traditional mean-field optimization techniques. Then, we show that we can replace the fully factorized distribution of mean-field by a weighted mixture of such distributions, that similarly minimizes the KL-Divergence to the true posterior. Our extension of the clamping method proposed in previous works allows us to both produce a more descriptive approximation of the true posterior and, inspired by the diverse MAP paradigms, fit a mixture of mean-field approximations. We demonstrate that this positively impacts real-world algorithms that initially relied on mean-fields. One of the important properties of the mean-field inference algorithms is that the closed-form updates are fully differentiable operations. This naturally allows to do parameter learning by simply unrolling multiple iterations of the updates, the so-called back-mean-field algorithm. We derive a novel and efficient structured learning method for multi-modal posterior distribution based on the Multi-Modal Mean-Field approximation, which can be seamlessly combined to modern gradient-based learning methods such as CNNs. Finally, we explore in more details the specific problem of structured learning and prediction for multiple-people detection in crowded scenes. We then present a mean-field based structured deep-learning detection algorithm that provides state of the art results on this dataset.

EPFL2018

Predicting in Uncertain Environments: Methods for Robust Machine Learning

Paul Thierry Yves Rolland

One of the main goal of Artificial Intelligence is to develop models capable of providing valuable predictions in real-world environments. In particular, Machine Learning (ML) seeks to design such models by learning from examples coming from this same environment. However, the real world is most of the time not static, and the environment in which the model will be used can differ from the one in which it is trained. It is hence desirable to design models that are robust to changes of environments. This encapsulates a large family of topics in ML, such as adversarial robustness, meta-learning, domain adaptation and others, depending on the way the environment is perturbed.In this dissertation, we focus on methods for training models whose performance does not drastically degrade when applied to environments differing from the one the model has been trained in. Various types of environmental changes will be treated, differing in their structure or magnitude. Each setup defines a certain kind of robustness to certain environmental changes, and leads to a certain optimization problem to be solved. We consider 3 different setups, and propose algorithms for solving each associated problem using 3 different types of methods, namely, min-max optimization (Chapter 2), regularization (Chapter 3) and variable selection (Chapter 4).Leveraging the framework of distributionally robust optimization, which phrases the problem of robust training as a min-max optimization problem, we first aim to train robust models by directly solving the associated min-max problem. This is done by exploiting recent work on game theory as well as first-order sampling algorithms based on Langevin dynamics. Using this approach, we propose a method for training robust agents in the scope of Reinforcement Learning.We then treat the case of adversarial robustness, i.e., robustness to small arbitrary perturbation of the model's input. It is known that neural networks trained using classical optimization methods are particularly sensitive to this type of perturbations. The adversarial robustness of a model is tightly connected to its smoothness, which is quantified by its so-called Lipschitz constant. This constant measures how much the model's output changes upon any bounded input perturbation. We hence develop a method to estimate an upper bound on the Lipschitz constant of neural networks via polynomial optimization, which can serve as a robustness certificate against adversarial attacks. We then propose to penalize the Lipschitz constant during training by minimizing the 1-path-norm of the neural network, and we develop an algorithm for solving the resulting regularized problem by efficiently computing the proximal operator of the 1-path-norm term, which is non-smooth and non-convex.Finally, we consider a scenario where the environmental changes can be arbitrary large (as opposed to adversarial robustness), but need to preserve a certain causal structure. Recent works have demonstrated interesting connections between robustness and the use of causal variables. Assuming that certain mechanisms remain invariant under some change of the environment, it has been shown that knowing the underlying causal structure of the data at hand allows to train models that are invariant to such changes. Unfortunately, in many cases, the causal structure is unknown. We thus propose a causal discovery algorithm from observational data in the case of non-linear additive model.