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Creating realistic VR experiences is challenging due to the labor-intensive process of accurately replicating real-world details into virtual scenes, highlighting the need for automated methods that maintain spatial accuracy and provide design flexibility. In this paper, we propose AURORA, a novel method that leverages RGB-D images to automatically generate both purely virtual reality (VR) scenes and VR scenes combined with real-world elements. This approach can benefit designers by streamlining the process of converting real-world details into virtual scenes. AURORA integrates advanced techniques in image processing, segmentation, and 3D reconstruction to efficiently create realistic and detailed interior designs from real-world environments. The design of this integration ensures optimal performance and precision, addressing key challenges in automated indoor design generation by uniquely combining and leveraging the strengths of foundation models. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach through experiments, both on self-captured data and public datasets, showcasing its potential to enhance virtual reality (VR) applications by providing interior designs that conform to real-world positioning., Comment: 8 pages, 4 figures

In the drug discovery process, the low success rate of drug candidate screening often leads to insufficient labeled data, causing the few-shot learning problem in molecular property prediction. Existing methods for few-shot molecular property prediction overlook the sample selection bias, which arises from non-random sample selection in chemical experiments. This bias in data representativeness leads to suboptimal performance. To overcome this challenge, we present a novel method named contextual representation anchor Network (CRA), where an anchor refers to a cluster center of the representations of molecules and serves as a bridge to transfer enriched contextual knowledge into molecular representations and enhance their expressiveness. CRA introduces a dual-augmentation mechanism that includes context augmentation, which dynamically retrieves analogous unlabeled molecules and captures their task-specific contextual knowledge to enhance the anchors, and anchor augmentation, which leverages the anchors to augment the molecular representations. We evaluate our approach on the MoleculeNet and FS-Mol benchmarks, as well as in domain transfer experiments. The results demonstrate that CRA outperforms the state-of-the-art by 2.60% and 3.28% in AUC and $\Delta$AUC-PR metrics, respectively, and exhibits superior generalization capabilities., Comment: 13 pages, 7 figures

Optimal mean shift vector (OMSV)-based importance sampling methods have long been prevalent in yield estimation and optimization as an industry standard. However, most OMSV-based methods are designed heuristically without a rigorous understanding of their limitations. To this end, we propose VIS, the first variational analysis framework for yield problems, enabling a systematic refinement for OMSV. For instance, VIS reveals that the classic OMSV is suboptimal, and the optimal/true OMSV should always stay beyond the failure boundary, which enables a free improvement for all OMSV-based methods immediately. Using VIS, we show a progressive refinement for the classic OMSV including incorporation of full covariance in closed form, adjusting for asymmetric failure distributions, and capturing multiple failure regions, each of which contributes to a progressive improvement of more than 2x. Inheriting the simplicity of OMSV, the proposed method retains simplicity and robustness yet achieves up to 29.03x speedup over the state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods. We also demonstrate how the SOTA yield optimization, ASAIS, can immediately benefit from our True OMSV, delivering a 1.20x and 1.27x improvement in performance and efficiency, respectively, without additional computational overhead., Comment: 2024 43rd ACM/IEEE International Conference on Computer-Aided Design (ICCAD)

Finite state machines (FSM's) are implemented with sequential circuits and are used to orchestrate the operation of hardware designs. Sequential obfuscation schemes aimed at preventing IP theft often operate by augmenting a design's FSM post-synthesis. Many such schemes are based on the ability to recover the FSM's topology from the synthesized design. In this paper, we present two tools which can improve the performance of topology extraction: RECUT, which extracts the FSM implementation from a netlist, and REFSM-SAT, which solves topology enumeration as a series of SAT problems. In some cases, these tools can improve performance significantly over current methods, attaining up to a 99\% decrease in runtime., Comment: 7 pages, 2 figures, 2 algorithms

We propose a framework for expressing and analyzing the Quality of Service (QoS) of message-passing systems using a choreographic model that consists of g-choreographies and Communicating Finite State machines (CFSMs). The following are our three main contributions: (I) an extension of CFSMs with non-functional contracts to specify quantitative constraints of local computations, (II) a dynamic temporal logic capable of expressing QoS, properties of systems relative to the g-choreography that specifies the communication protocol, (III) the semi-decidability of our logic which enables a bounded model-checking approach to verify QoS property of communicating systems., Comment: 20 pages, Accepted for publication at International Conference on Theoretical Aspects of Computing 2023

We present MoCheQoS, a bounded model checker to analyse (QoS) properties of message-passing systems. Building on the dynamic temporal logic, the choreographic model, and the bounded model checking algorithm defined in our ICTAC 2023 paper, MoCheQoS enables the static analysis of QoS properties of systems built out from the composition of services. We consider QoS properties on measurable application-level attributes as well as resource consumption metrics for example those relating monetary cost to memory usage. The implementation of the tool is accompanied by an experimental evaluation. More precisely, we present two case studies meant to evaluate the applicability of MoCheQoS; the first is based on the AWS cloud while the second analyses a communicating system automatically extracted from code. Additionally, we consider synthetically generated experiments to assess the scalability of MoCheQoS. These experiments showed that our model can faithfully capture and effectively analyse QoS properties in industrial-strength scenarios., Comment: 28 pages

Being able to efficiently obtain an accurate estimate of the failure probability of SRAM components has become a central issue as model circuits shrink their scale to submicrometer with advanced technology nodes. In this work, we revisit the classic norm minimization method. We then generalize it with infinite components and derive the novel optimal manifold concept, which bridges the surrogate-based and importance sampling (IS) yield estimation methods. We then derive a sub-optimal manifold, optimal hypersphere, which leads to an efficient sampling method being aware of the failure boundary called onion sampling. Finally, we use a neural coupling flow (which learns from samples like a surrogate model) as the IS proposal distribution. These combinations give rise to a novel yield estimation method, named Optimal Manifold Important Sampling (OPTIMIS), which keeps the advantages of the surrogate and IS methods to deliver state-of-the-art performance with robustness and consistency, with up to 3.5x in efficiency and 3x in accuracy over the best of SOTA methods in High-dimensional SRAM evaluation., Comment: 2023 60th ACM/IEEE Design Automation Conference(DAC)

Reconstructing geometric shapes from point clouds is a common task that is often accomplished by experts manually modeling geometries in CAD-capable software. State-of-the-art workflows based on fully automatic geometry extraction are limited by point cloud density and memory constraints, and require pre- and post-processing by the user. In this work, we present a framework for interactive, user-driven, feature-assisted geometry reconstruction from arbitrarily sized point clouds. Based on seeded region-growing point cloud segmentation, the user interactively extracts planar pieces of geometry and utilizes contextual suggestions to point out plane surfaces, normal and tangential directions, and edges and corners. We implement a set of feature-assisted tools for high-precision modeling tasks in architecture and urban surveying scenarios, enabling instant-feedback interactive point cloud manipulation on large-scale data collected from real-world building interiors and facades. We evaluate our results through systematic measurement of the reconstruction accuracy, and interviews with domain experts who deploy our framework in a commercial setting and give both structured and subjective feedback., Comment: 13 pages, submitted to Computers & Graphics Journal

Despite the fast advances in high-sigma yield analysis with the help of machine learning techniques in the past decade, one of the main challenges, the curse of dimensionality, which is inevitable when dealing with modern large-scale circuits, remains unsolved. To resolve this challenge, we propose an absolute shrinkage deep kernel learning, ASDK, which automatically identifies the dominant process variation parameters in a nonlinear-correlated deep kernel and acts as a surrogate model to emulate the expensive SPICE simulation. To further improve the yield estimation efficiency, we propose a novel maximization of approximated entropy reduction for an efficient model update, which is also enhanced with parallel batch sampling for parallel computing, making it ready for practical deployment. Experiments on SRAM column circuits demonstrate the superiority of ASDK over the state-of-the-art (SOTA) approaches in terms of accuracy and efficiency with up to 10.3x speedup over SOTA methods.

Tenuous subgraph finding aims to detect a subgraph with few social interactions and weak relationships among nodes. Despite significant efforts have been made on this task, they are mostly carried out in view of graph-structured data. These methods depend on calculating the shortest path and need to enumerate all the paths between nodes, which suffer the combinatorial explosion. Moreover, they all lack the integration of neighborhood information. To this end, we propose a novel model named Graph Neural Network with Motif-aware for tenuous subgraph finding (GNNM), a neighborhood aggregation based GNNs framework which can capture the latent relationship between nodes. Specially, we design a GNN module to project nodes into a low dimensional vector combining the higher-order correlation within nodes based on a motif-aware module. And then design greedy algorithms in vector space to obtain a tenuous subgraph whose size is greater than a specified constraint. Particularly, considering existing evaluation indicators cannot capture the latent friendship between nodes, we introduce a novel Potential Friend(PF) concept to measure the tenuity of a graph from a new perspective. Experimental results on the real-world and synthetic datasets demonstrate that our proposed method GNNM outperforms existing algorithms in efficiency and subgraph quality., Comment: 15 pages, 14 figures

We describe a novel approach for exploring, visualizing and modelling of complex textile structures. We show this approach in action for the exploration of weft-knitted spacer fabrics. The modelling tools are readily available and represent a fast-growing approach in communities of generative design. The approach helps solving the problem that spacer fabrics are complex structures which are hard to imagine and to visualize. The explorations turn out insight-full and flexible and are complementary to what can be done with existing tools., Comment: 11 pages, 7 figures

Significant effort has been made to solve computationally expensive optimization problems in the past two decades, and various optimization methods incorporating surrogates into optimization have been proposed. Most research focuses on either exploiting the surrogate by defining a utility optimization problem or customizing an existing optimization method to use one or multiple approximation models. However, only a little attention has been paid to generic concepts applicable to different types of algorithms and optimization problems simultaneously. Thus this paper proposes a generalized probabilistic surrogate-assisted framework (GPSAF), applicable to a broad category of unconstrained and constrained, single- and multi-objective optimization algorithms. The idea is based on a surrogate assisting an existing optimization method. The assistance is based on two distinct phases, one facilitating exploration and another exploiting the surrogates. The exploration and exploitation of surrogates are automatically balanced by performing a probabilistic knockout tournament among different clusters of solutions. A study of multiple well-known population-based optimization algorithms is conducted with and without the proposed surrogate assistance on single- and multi-objective optimization problems with a maximum solution evaluation budget of 300 or less. The results indicate the effectiveness of applying GPSAF to an optimization algorithm and the competitiveness with other surrogate-assisted algorithms.

The modeling and control of complex physical systems are essential in real-world problems. We propose a novel framework that is generally applicable to solving PDE-constrained optimal control problems by introducing surrogate models for PDE solution operators with special regularizers. The procedure of the proposed framework is divided into two phases: solution operator learning for PDE constraints (Phase 1) and searching for optimal control (Phase 2). Once the surrogate model is trained in Phase 1, the optimal control can be inferred in Phase 2 without intensive computations. Our framework can be applied to both data-driven and data-free cases. We demonstrate the successful application of our method to various optimal control problems for different control variables with diverse PDE constraints from the Poisson equation to Burgers' equation., Comment: 15 pages, 12 figures. Published as a conference paper at Thirty-Sixth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI 2022)

We present an observational study to compare co-located and situated real-time visualizations in basketball free-throw training. Our goal is to understand the advantages and concerns of applying immersive visualization to real-world skill-based sports training and to provide insights for designing AR sports training systems. We design both a situated 3D visualization on a head-mounted display and a 2D visualization on a co-located display to provide immediate visual feedback on a player's shot performance. Using a within-subject study design with experienced basketball shooters, we characterize user goals, report on qualitative training experiences, and compare the quantitative training results. Our results show that real-time visual feedback helps athletes refine subsequent shots. Shooters in our study achieve greater angle consistency with our visual feedback. Furthermore, AR visualization promotes an increased focus on body form in athletes. Finally, we present suggestions for the design of future sports AR studies., Comment: To appear in the 2021 ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI 2021)

Optimal Bayesian design techniques provide an estimate for the best parameters of an experiment in order to maximize the value of measurements prior to the actual collection of data. In other words, these techniques explore the space of possible observations and determine an experimental setup that produces maximum information about the system parameters on average. Generally, optimal Bayesian design formulations result in multiple high-dimensional integrals that are difficult to evaluate without incurring significant computational costs as each integration point corresponds to solving a coupled system of partial differential equations. In the present work, we propose a novel approach for development of polynomial chaos expansion (PCE) surrogate model for the design utility function. In particular, we demonstrate how the orthogonality of PCE basis polynomials can be utilized in order to replace the expensive integration over the space of possible observations by direct construction of PCE approximation for the expected information gain. This novel technique enables the derivation of a reasonable quality response surface for the targeted objective function with a computational budget comparable to several single-point evaluations. Therefore, the proposed technique reduces dramatically the overall cost of optimal Bayesian experimental design. We evaluate this alternative formulation utilizing PCE on few numerical test cases with various levels of complexity to illustrate the computational advantages of the proposed approach., Comment: 30 pages, 9 figures. Published in Computer Methods in Applied Mechanics and Engineering

The case study analyzed in the report involves the behavioral specification and verification of a three-stage pipeline consisting of mutually concurrent modules which also compete for a shared resource. The system components are specified in terms of Concurrent State Machines (CSM) and the verification technique used is the temporal model checking in the COSMA environment., Comment: 15 pages, 11 figures, European Congress on Computational Methods in Applied Sciences and Engineering ECCOMAS 2004, Jyv\"askyl\"a, Finland, 24-28 July 2004

Environmental changes, failures, collisions or even terrorist attacks can cause serious malfunctions of the delivery systems. We have presented a novel approach improving resilience of Autonomous Moving Platforms AMPs. The approach is based on multi-level state diagrams describing environmental trigger specifications, movement actions and synchronization primitives. The upper level diagrams allowed us to model advanced interactions between autonomous AMPs and detect irregularities such as deadlocks live-locks etc. The techniques were presented to verify and analyze combined AMPs' behaviors using model checking technique. The described system, Dedan verifier, is still under development. In the near future, a graphical form of verified system representation is planned., Comment: 11 pages, 5 figures

To cope with the complex embedded system design, early design space exploration (DSE) is used to make design decisions early in the design phase. For early DSE it is crucial that the running time of the exploration is as small as possible. In this paper, we describe both the porting of our scenario-based DSE to the SPARC T3-4 server and the analysis of its performance behavior.