Singapore

Hardware accelerators such as GPUs, NPUs, and FPGAs are essential to meeting AI’s computational demands. With the proliferation of heterogeneous devices across cloud and edge, various model optimization techniques adapt to diverse hardware characteristics through operator transformations and structural modifications. Accurate, efficient latency prediction enables rapid selection of optimal strategies across hardware backends.
Many existing methods treat hardware as a black-box executor, directly regressing latency without explicitly modeling the intricate interactions between neural network (NN) structures and device-specific execution behaviors. To address these challenges, we introduce a new modeling perspective that captures the interaction between neural architectures and hardware execution. To capture device-specific characteristics, we propose two complementary modeling strategies. The Device Behavior Signature Selector (DBSel) characterizes hardware execution behavior by selectively probing a small set of representative architectures, forming a compact, workload-driven profile. In parallel, we construct capability vectors that capture the hierarchical memory of each device and compute characteristics, providing a structured abstraction of its architectural capacity. To unify both behavioral and structural views, we introduce the Hardware–Operation Dialogue Module (HODM), which models fine-grained interactions between neural operators and hardware properties. Together, these components empower CloserToMe to deliver accurate and transferable latency predictions across unseen and diverse platforms. Extensive experiments show that CloserToMe reduces relative absolute error by up to 64% compared to state-of-the-art methods. The code, detailed theoretical analysis, and extended experiments are included in the supplementary material.

AAAI 2026

CloserToMe: A Unified Framework for Accurate and Transferable Latency Prediction Across Heterogeneous Devices

ml: hardware-aware ml

ml: applications

machine learning (ml)

 Electronic design and design automation (EDA) is a key enabling technology in the advancement of information processing that we are enjoying today. EDA has provided fundamental design principles and tools empowering the exponential growth of the number of transistors on an integrated circuit chip over the past 50 years. Without EDA, it would not have been possible for billion-transistor chips to be a reality! 

After five decades of growth, the field of EDA now faces some unique challenges. On one hand, we are approaching the physical limit of transistor scaling, and the golden days of exponential growth in transistor density are over. The exorbitant cost of integrated circuit fabrication and the excessive complexity of EDA tools make it difficult to bring design automation innovations to practice. On the other hand, the recent rise of machine learning and artificial intelligence applications and emerging architectures and technologies calls for more customized solutions to designing electronic systems. 

## **Objectives of the Workshop:**

This workshop, funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF), will assemble a diverse group of leading researchers from both academia and industry to identify future research directions in design and design automation of electronic systems and architectures in response to the challenges and opportunities. It will feature plenary talks and panels as well as roundtable discussions. Collectively, the workshop attendees will explore answers to overarching questions such as 

•	what are the high-risk and high-return research topics, 

•	what other fields adjacent to EDA research should be aggressively pursued for highly interdisciplinary collaboration, and

•	where the research funding should come from and how it should be distributed to encourage more transformative research. 

The workshop will also include a satellite event with a roundtable panel discussion on strategies to improve foundry access to US-based EDA researchers. A final report, based on the deliberations of the workshop, will be produced to the government recommending future research directions.


NSF Workshop on Micro/Nano Circuits and Systems Design

poster

We are pleased to announce the Fortieth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-26), which will be held in Singapore EXPO from January 20 to January 27, 2026.

The purpose of the AAAI conference series is to promote research in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and foster scientific exchange between researchers, practitioners, scientists, students, and engineers across the entirety of AI and its affiliated disciplines. AAAI-26 will feature technical paper presentations, special tracks, invited speakers, workshops, tutorials, poster sessions, senior member presentations, competitions, and exhibit programs, and a range of other activities to be announced.<br><br>

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We are pleased to announce the Fortieth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-26), which will be held in Singapore EXPO from January 20 to January 27, 2026.

Uncertainty quantification (UQ) in foundation models is crucial for identifying and mitigating hallucinations in automatically generated text. 
However, heuristic UQ approaches lack statistical guarantees for key metrics such as the false discovery rate (FDR) in selective prediction tasks. Previous research adopts the split conformal prediction (SCP) framework to ensure desired coverage of admissible answers by constructing data-driven prediction sets, yet these sets typically contain incorrect candidates, undermining their practical effectiveness. To address this, we introduce COIN, an uncertainty-guarding selection framework that calibrates statistically valid uncertainty thresholds to filter a single generated answer per question under user-specified FDR constraints. COIN estimates the empirical error rate on the calibration set and applies confidence interval methods such as Clopper–Pearson to establish a high-probability upper bound on the true error rate (i.e., FDR). This enables the selection of the largest threshold that ensures FDR control on test data while significantly increasing sample retention. We demonstrate COIN's robustness in risk control, strong test-time power in retaining admissible answers, and predictive efficiency under limited calibration data across both general and multimodal text generation tasks. Furthermore, we show that employing alternative UQ and upper bound construction strategies can further boost COIN's power performance, which underscores its extensibility and adaptability to diverse application scenarios.

COIN: Uncertainty-Guarding Selective Question Answering for Foundation Models with Provable Risk Guarantees

Enabling multi-task adaptation in pre-trained Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) models is crucial for enhancing their generalization capabilities. Most existing pre-trained LoRA fusion methods decompose weight matrices, sharing similar parameters, while fusion
divergent ones. However, this paradigm inevitably induces inter-weight conflicts and leads to catastrophic domain forgetting. While incremental learning enables adaptation to multiple tasks, it struggles to achieve generalization in few-shot scenarios. Consequently, when the weight data follows a long-tailed distribution, it can lead to forgetting in the fused weights. To address this issue, we propose In-Context Meta LoRA Fusion (ICM-Fusion), a novel framework that synergizes meta-learning with in-context adaptation. The key innovation lies in our task vector arithmetic, which dynamically balances conflicting optimization directions across domains through learned manifold projections. ICM-Fusion obtains the optimal task vector orientation for the fused model in the latent space by adjusting the orientation of the task vectors. Subsequently, the fused LoRA is reconstructed by a self-designed Fusion VAE (F-VAE) to realize multi-task LoRA generation. We have conducted extensive experiments on visual and linguistic tasks, and the experimental results demonstrate that ICM-Fusion can be adapted to a wide range of architectural models and applied to various tasks. Compared to the current pre-trained LoRA fusion method, ICM-Fusion fused LoRA can significantly reduce the multi-tasking loss and can even achieve task enhancement in few-shot scenarios.

ICM-Fusion: In-Context Meta-Optimized LoRA Fusion for Multi-Task Adaptation

Large Language Models (LLMs) are prone to generating incorrect or outdated information, thereby necessitating efficient and precise mechanisms for knowledge updates. Existing knowledge editing approaches, however, often encounter conflicts between two competing objectives: maintaining existing knowledge (preservation) and incorporating new information (editing). During gradient-based optimization, these conflicting objectives can lead to imbalanced update directions, where one gradient dominates, ultimately resulting in suboptimal learning dynamics. To address this challenge, we propose a balanced knowledge editing framework inspired by Nash bargaining theory. Our method guides the optimization process toward a Pareto stationary point, ensuring an equilibrium solution wherein any deviation from the final state would degrade the overall performance with respect to both objectives. This guarantees optimality in preserving prior knowledge while integrating new information. We empirically validate the effectiveness of our approach across a range of evaluation metrics on standard benchmark datasets. Extensive experiments show that our method consistently outperforms state-of-the-art techniques, achieving a superior balance between knowledge preservation and update accuracy.

Editing Is a Bargaining Game: Balanced Knowledge Editing in Large Language Models

Unsupervised visual anomaly detection from multi-view images presents a significant challenge: distinguishing genuine defects from benign appearance variations caused by viewpoint changes. Existing methods, often designed for single-view inputs, treat multiple views as a disconnected set of images, leading to inconsistent feature representations and a high false-positive rate. To address this, we introduce ViewSense-AD (VSAD), a novel framework that learns viewpoint-invariant representations by explicitly modeling geometric consistency across views. At its core is our Multi-View Alignment Module (MVAM), which leverages homography to project and align corresponding feature regions between neighboring views. We integrate MVAM into a View-Align Latent Diffusion Model (VALDM), enabling progressive and multi-stage alignment during the denoising process. This allows the model to build a coherent and holistic understanding of the object's surface from coarse to fine scales. Furthermore, a lightweight Fusion Refiner Module (FRM) enhances the global consistency of the aligned features, suppressing noise and improving discriminative power. Anomaly detection is performed by comparing multi-level features from the diffusion model against a learned memory bank of normal prototypes. Extensive experiments on the challenging RealIAD and MANTA datasets demonstrate that VSAD sets a new state-of-the-art, significantly outperforming existing methods in pixel, view, and sample-level visual anomaly detection, proving its robustness to large viewpoint shifts and complex textures.

Unsupervised Multi-View Visual Anomaly Detection via Progressive Homography-Guided Alignment

Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) incur high computational costs due to significant redundancy in their visual tokens. To effectively reduce this cost, researchers have proposed various visual token pruning methods. However, existing methods are generally limited, either losing critical visual information prematurely due to pruning in the vision encoder, or leading to information redundancy among the selected tokens due to pruning in the Large Language Models (LLMs). To address these challenges, we propose a Visual and Textual Semantic Collaborative Pruning framework (ViTCoP) that combines redundancy filtering in the vision encoder with step-wise co-pruning within the LLM based on its hierarchical characteristics, to efficiently preserve critical and informationally diverse visual tokens. Meanwhile, to ensure compatibility with acceleration techniques like FlashAttention, we introduce the L2 norm of K-vectors as the token saliency metric in the LLM. Extensive experiments on various Large Vision-Language Models demonstrate that ViTCoP not only achieves state-of-the-art performance surpassing existing methods on both image and video understanding tasks, but also significantly reduces model inference latency and GPU memory consumption. Notably, its performance advantage over other methods becomes even more pronounced under extreme pruning rates.

ViTCoP: Accelerating Large Vision-Language Models via Visual and Textual Semantic Collaborative Pruning

Referring Image Segmentation (RIS), which aims to segment specific objects based on natural language descriptions, plays an essential role in vision-language understanding. Despite its progress in remote sensing applications, RIS under Low-Altitude Drone (LAD) scenarios remains underexplored, as existing datasets and methods are typically designed for high-altitude and static-view imagery. They struggled to handle the unique characteristics of LAD views, such as diverse viewpoints and high object density. In this paper, we propose RIS-LAD, the first fine-grained RIS benchmark tailored for LAD scenarios, featuring 13,871 meticulously annotated image-text-mask triplets collected from real-world drone footage with emphasis on small, densely cluttered objects and multi-view perspectives. Additionally, we propose the Semantic-Aware Adaptive Reasoning Network, which decomposes and adaptively routes semantic information to different network stages rather than uniformly injecting all linguistic features. Specifically, the Category-Dominated Linguistic Enhancement aligns visual features with object categories during early encoding, while the Adaptive Reasoning Fusion Module dynamically selects semantic cues across scales to enhance reasoning in complex scenes. Extensive experiments reveal that RIS-LAD presents substantial challenges to state-of-the-art RIS algorithms, and also demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed model in addressing these challenges. RIS-LAD is publicly released and is available at: https://github.com/AHideoKuzeA/RIS-LAD-A-Benchmark-and-Model-for-Referring-Low-Altitude-Drone-Image-Segmentation.

RIS-LAD: A Benchmark and Model for Referring Image Segmentation in Low-Altitude Drone Imagery

Underwater image enhancement (UIE) aims to address image degradation caused by water absorption and scattering effects. Despite significant progress in deep learning-based UIE methods, existing approaches still face key challenges due to the neglect of physical imaging principle. Moreover, while current Mamba models achieve global modeling via multi-directional scanning, their local sequential strategy lacks sufficient global context. To this end, we propose a novel Physical Model-Guided Global Mamba (PGMamba) that combines the efficient sequential modeling capability of Mamba with underwater imaging physical model. Specifically, we first design a Spatial-Aware Global Mamba (SAGMamba) that achieves efficient long-range dependency modeling through a spatial-aware ranking strategy with global context information. Second, we develop a Physical Model-Guided Feed-Forward Network (PMGFFN) that explicitly incorporates underwater optical imaging principles into the network architecture. Extensive experimental results and comprehensive ablation studies demonstrate the outstanding performance and importance of our proposed method.

PGMamba: A Physical Model-Guided Global Mamba for Underwater Image Enhancement

Dual-lens video inpainting aims to simultaneously restore missing or corrupted contents in videos captured by each lens of binocular systems. Although preliminary explorations have been conducted, existing methods still face two key challenges: limited exploitation of long-range reference information and inadequate modeling of inter-lens consistency in non-standard binocular systems. In this paper, we propose a novel dual-lens video inpainting framework named DLVINet, which addresses these challenges with two core components. Firstly, we develop a sparse spatial-temporal transformer (SSTT) that effectively utilizes the information from distant frames to complete the video contents of each lens individually. By employing sparse spatial-temporal attention with a channel selection mechanism, SSTT not only restores missing regions, but also avoids introducing redundant or irrelevant information. Furthermore, SSTT introduces a multi-scale feed-forward network to enrich the multi-scale representation of completed features. Secondly, we design a cross-lens texture transformer (CLTT) to model inter-lens consistency. By interacting with corresponding features between lenses under the guidance of cross-attention, CLTT captures global inter-lens correspondences. Such a design enables effective cross-view information modeling without being constrained by horizontal parallax, which is particularly critical for non-standard binocular systems. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our DLVINet.

DLVINet: Advancing Dual-Lens Video Inpainting Beyond Parallax Constraints

Strategic machine learning investigates scenarios where agents manipulate their features to receive favorable decisions from predictive models. To address fairness concerns intrinsic to strategic classification, recent work has introduced group-specific fairness constraints. However, current fairness-aware approaches face a fundamental dilemma in the issue of fairness exposure: making these constraints public enables strategic manipulation and can lead to fairness reversal, while keeping them hidden may reduce social welfare and discourage genuine improvement.
To fill this gap, we subsequently propose the problem of Partial Fairness Awareness (PFA), as our theoretical analysis informs that such a dilemma can be mitigated by releasing the candidate set of fairness constraints and concealing the grounding constraint. 
To be specific, we introduce a belief-guided strategic mechanism wherein agents iteratively interact with the decision system and maintain a belief distribution over the candidate set of fairness constraints. This belief-guided process enables agents, through iterative interaction and feedback, to update their belief distribution over the candidate set, thereby gradually aligning their belief with the grounding fairness constraint employed by the system.
Extensive experiments on real-world and synthetic datasets demonstrate that PFA achieves lower group fairness gaps, higher acceptance of truly qualified individuals, and more stable outcomes compared to fully public or private fairness regimes.

Partial Fairness Awareness: Belief-Guided Strategic Mechanism for Strategic Agents

Point cloud data augmentation is critical to improving the generalization of 3D deep learning models. However, existing methods often fail to preserve the underlying manifold structure, leading to semantic distortion or topology violation. This causes models to learn untrustworthy features, thereby limiting the representational ability of the model. To overcome these limitations, we propose ManiPoint, a novel point cloud augmentation framework based on diffeomorphism that explicitly preserves manifold structure during deformation. ManiPoint constructs diffeomorphic transformations via continuous differentiable mappings, ensuring topological consistency and geometric continuity between original and augmented data. To prevent excessive distortion and ensure semantic consistency, we introduce a controllable deformation mechanism that quantitatively constrains the augmentation magnitude and enables fine-grained control over the deformation space. We further provide theoretical analysis, indicating that, compared with topologically inconsistent methods, ManiPoint reduces empirical and vicinal risks by generating diverse and structurally reliable samples. Extensive experiments and visualizations on object-level datasets demonstrate that ManiPoint produces high-quality augmentations and consistently improves model robustness over existing baselines. Meanwhile, the scalability of our method was further verified on the scene-level datasets.

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COIN: Uncertainty-Guarding Selective Question Answering for Foundation Models with Provable Risk Guarantees

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AI/ML and other hardware design