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Quantum computing, leveraging quantum phenomena like superposition and entanglement, is emerging as a transformative force in computing technology, promising unparalleled computational speed and efficiency crucial for engineering applications. This advancement presents both opportunities and challenges, requiring engineers to familiarize themselves with quantum principles, applications, and complexities. This paper systematically explores the foundational concepts of quantum mechanics and their implications for computational advancements, emphasizing the superiority of quantum algorithms in solving engineering problems. It identifies areas where gate-based quantum computing has the potential to outperform classical methods despite facing scalability and coherence issues. By offering clear examples with minimal reliance on in-depth quantum physics or hardware specifics, the aim is to make quantum computing accessible to engineers, addressing the steep learning curve and fostering its practical adoption for complex problem-solving and technological advancement as quantum hardware becomes more robust and reliable.

General matrix multiplication (GEMM) operations are crucial in various computational fields. As GPU architectures evolve, optimizing GEMM performance becomes increasingly important. This paper introduces Stream-K++, an enhancement to the promising Stream-K GEMM scheduling algorithm. We expand Stream-K's scheduling policies from three to seven and implement an efficient solution selection mechanism using Bloom filters. Our approach rapidly eliminates up to 95.8% of unsuitable configurations while maintaining a 100% true-negative rate. Implemented using the AMD Composable Kernel library and evaluated on AMD Instinct MI250X GPUs, Stream-K++ demonstrates significant performance gains (up to 43%) in select scenarios. It remains competitive (within 20% of optimal) for 60-97.6% of problem sizes. Our flexible framework, implemented in the Opensieve C++ library, allows for easy adaptation to new problem sizes, scheduling policies, or additional tuning parameters, paving the way for future optimizations in GPU-based GEMM operations.

Quantum linear system algorithms (QLSAs) can provide exponential speedups for the solution of linear systems, but the growth of the condition number for finite element problems can eliminate the exponential speedup. QLSAs are also incapable of using an initial guess of a solution to improve upon it. To circumvent these issues, we present a Quantum Multigrid Algorithm (qMG) for the iterative solution of linear systems by applying the sequence of multigrid operations on a quantum state. Given an initial guess with error e_0, qMG can produce a vector encoding the entire sequence of multigrid iterates with the final iterate having a relative error e'=e/e_0, as a subspace of the final quantum state, with exponential advantage in O( poly log (N/e') ) time using O( poly log (N/e') ) qubits. Although extracting the final iterate from the sequence is efficient, extracting the sequence of iterates from the final quantum state can be inefficient. We provide an analysis of the complexity of the method along with numerical analysis.

Modern GPUs are designed for regular problems and suffer from load imbalance when processing irregular data. Prior to our work, a domain expert selects the best kernel to map fine-grained irregular parallelism to a GPU. We instead propose Seer, an abstraction for producing a simple, reproduceable, and understandable decision tree selector model which performs runtime kernel selection for irregular workloads. To showcase our framework, we conduct a case study in Sparse Matrix Vector Multiplication (SpMV), in which Seer predicts the best strategy for a given dataset with an improvement of 2$\times$ over the best single iteration kernel across the entire SuiteSparse Matrix Collection dataset.

We introduce the Sparsity Roofline, a visual performance model for evaluating sparsity in neural networks. The Sparsity Roofline jointly models network accuracy, sparsity, and theoretical inference speedup. Our approach does not require implementing and benchmarking optimized kernels, and the theoretical speedup becomes equal to the actual speedup when the corresponding dense and sparse kernels are well-optimized. We achieve this through a novel analytical model for predicting sparse network performance, and validate the predicted speedup using several real-world computer vision architectures pruned across a range of sparsity patterns and degrees. We demonstrate the utility and ease-of-use of our model through two case studies: (1) we show how machine learning researchers can predict the performance of unimplemented or unoptimized block-structured sparsity patterns, and (2) we show how hardware designers can predict the performance implications of new sparsity patterns and sparse data formats in hardware. In both scenarios, the Sparsity Roofline helps performance experts identify sparsity regimes with the highest performance potential.

Quantum linear system algorithms (QLSAs) for gate-based quantum computing can provide exponential speedups for solving linear systems but face challenges when applied to finite element problems due to the growth of the condition number with problem size. Furthermore, QLSAs cannot use an approximate solution or initial guess to output an improved solution. Here, we present Quantum Relaxation for Linear System (qRLS), as an iterative approach for gate-based quantum computers by embedding linear stationary iterations into a larger block linear system. The condition number of the block linear system scales linearly with the number of iterations independent of the size and condition number of the original system. The well-conditioned system enables a practical iterative solution of finite element problems using the state-of-the-art Quantum Signal Processing (QSP) variant of QLSAs, for which we provide numerical results using a quantum computer simulator. The iteration complexity demonstrates favorable scaling relative to classical architectures, as the solution time is independent of system size and requires O(log(N)) qubits. This represents an exponential efficiency gain, offering a new approach for iterative finite element problem-solving on quantum hardware.

We propose a GPU fine-grained load-balancing abstraction that decouples load balancing from work processing and aims to support both static and dynamic schedules with a programmable interface to implement new load-balancing schedules. Prior to our work, the only way to unleash the GPU's potential on irregular problems has been to workload-balance through application-specific, tightly coupled load-balancing techniques. With our open-source framework for load-balancing, we hope to improve programmers' productivity when developing irregular-parallel algorithms on the GPU, and also improve the overall performance characteristics for such applications by allowing a quick path to experimentation with a variety of existing load-balancing techniques. Consequently, we also hope that by separating the concerns of load-balancing from work processing within our abstraction, managing and extending existing code to future architectures becomes easier., Comment: This work previously appeared in the author's PhD dissertation, available at arXiv:2212.08964 Also published in the 28th ACM SIGPLAN Annual Symposium on Principles and Practice of Parallel Programming (PPoPP '23)

We introduce Stream-K, a work-centric parallelization of matrix multiplication (GEMM) and related computations in dense linear algebra. Whereas contemporary decompositions are primarily tile-based, our method operates by partitioning an even share of the aggregate inner loop iterations among physical processing elements. This provides a near-perfect utilization of computing resources, regardless of how efficiently the output tiling for any given problem quantizes across the underlying processing elements. On GPU processors, our Stream-K parallelization of GEMM produces a peak speedup of up to 14$\times$ and 6.7$\times$, and an average performance response that is both higher and more consistent across 32,824 GEMM problem geometries than state-of-the-art math libraries such as CUTLASS and cuBLAS. Furthermore, we achieve this performance from a single tile size configuration per floating-point precision, whereas today's math libraries employ complex kernel-selection heuristics to select from a large ensemble of kernel variants., Comment: This work previously appeared in the author's PhD dissertation, available at arXiv:2212.08964

Fine-grained workload and resource balancing is the key to high performance for regular and irregular computations on the GPUs. In this dissertation, we conduct an extensive survey of existing load-balancing techniques to build an abstraction that addresses the difficulty of scheduling computations on the GPU. We propose a GPU fine-grained load-balancing abstraction that decouples load balancing from work processing and aims to support both static and dynamic schedules with a programmable interface to implement new load-balancing schedules. Prior to our work, the only way to unleash the GPU's potential on irregular problems has been to workload-balance through application-specific, tightly coupled load-balancing techniques. With our open-source framework for load-balancing, we hope to improve programmers' productivity when developing irregular-parallel algorithms on the GPU, and also improve the overall performance characteristics for such applications by allowing a quick path to experimentation with a variety of existing load-balancing techniques. Using our insights from load-balancing irregular workloads, we build Stream-K, a work-centric parallelization of matrix multiplication (GEMM) and related computations in dense linear algebra. Whereas contemporary decompositions are primarily tile-based, our method operates by partitioning an even share of the aggregate inner loop iterations among physical processing elements. This provides a near-perfect utilization of computing resources, regardless of how efficiently the output tiling for any given problem quantizes across the underlying processing elements. On GPU processors, our Stream-K parallelization of GEMM produces a peak speedup of up to 14x and 6.7x, and an average performance response that is both higher and more consistent across 32K GEMM problem geometries than state-of-the-art math libraries such as CUTLASS and cuBLAS., Comment: Submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy

We identify the graph data structure, frontiers, operators, an iterative loop structure, and convergence conditions as essential components of graph analytics systems based on the native-graph approach. Using these essential components, we propose an abstraction that captures all the significant programming models within graph analytics, such as bulk-synchronous, asynchronous, shared-memory, message-passing, and push vs. pull traversals. Finally, we demonstrate the power of our abstraction with an elegant modern C++ implementation of single-source shortest path and its required components., Comment: Proceedings of the Workshop on Graphs, Architectures, Programming, and Learning

The increase in the number of unmanned aerial vehicles a.k.a. drones pose several threats to public privacy, critical infrastructure and cyber security. Hence, detecting unauthorized drones is a significant problem which received attention in the last few years. In this paper, we present our experimental work on three drone detection methods (i.e., acoustic detection, radio frequency (RF) detection, and visual detection) to evaluate their efficacy in both indoor and outdoor environments. Owing to the limitations of these schemes, we present a novel encryption-based drone detection scheme that uses a two-stage verification of the drone's received signal strength indicator (RSSI) and the encryption key generated from the drone's position coordinates to reliably detect an unauthorized drone in the presence of authorized drones., Comment: This paper has been accepted for presentation in 23rd IEEE International Conference on Industrial Technology (ICIT22), 22 - 25 August, 2022, Shanghai, China

The solution of physical problems discretized using the finite element methods using quantum computers remains relatively unexplored. Here, we present a unified formulation (FEqa) to solve such problems using quantum annealers. FEqa is a hybrid technique in which the finite element problem is formulated on a classical computer, and the residual is minimized using a quantum annealer. The advantages of FEqa include utilizing a single qubit per degree of freedom, enforcing Dirichlet boundary conditions a priori, reaching arbitrary solution precision, and eliminating the possibility of the annealer generating invalid results. FEqa is scalable on the classical portion of the algorithm due to its Single Program Multiple Data (SPMD) nature and does not rely on ground state solutions from the annealer. The exponentially large number of collocation points used in quantum annealing are investigated for their cosine measures, and new iterative techniques are developed to exploit their properties. The quantum annealer has clear advantages in computational time over simulated annealing, for the example problems presented in this paper solved on the D-Wave machine. The presented work provides a pathway to solving physical problems using quantum annealers., Comment: 32 pages, 20 figures

We consider the problem of learning from training data obtained in different contexts, where the underlying context distribution is unknown and is estimated empirically. We develop a robust method that takes into account the uncertainty of the context distribution. Unlike the conventional and overly conservative minimax approach, we focus on excess risks and construct distribution sets with statistical coverage to achieve an appropriate trade-off between performance and robustness. The proposed method is computationally scalable and shown to interpolate between empirical risk minimization and minimax regret objectives. Using both real and synthetic data, we demonstrate its ability to provide robustness in worst-case scenarios without harming performance in the nominal scenario., Comment: Paper under SPL review

We address the problem of timing-based localization in wireless networks, when an unknown fraction of data is corrupted by nonideal signal conditions. While timing-based techniques enable accurate localization, they are also sensitive to such corrupted data. We develop a robust method that is applicable to a range of localization techniques, including time-of-arrival, time-difference-of-arrival and time-difference in schedule-based transmissions. The method is nonparametric and requires only an upper bound on the fraction of corrupted data, thus obviating distributional assumptions of the corrupting noise distribution. The robustness of the method is demonstrated in numerical experiments.

A spatial point process can be characterized by an intensity function which predicts the number of events that occur across space. In this paper, we develop a method to infer predictive intensity intervals by learning a spatial model using a regularized criterion. We prove that the proposed method exhibits out-of-sample prediction performance guarantees which, unlike standard estimators, are valid even when the spatial model is misspecified. The method is demonstrated using synthetic as well as real spatial data.

We address the problem of learning a decision policy from observational data of past decisions in contexts with features and associated outcomes. The past policy maybe unknown and in safety-critical applications, such as medical decision support, it is of interest to learn robust policies that reduce the risk of outcomes with high costs. In this paper, we develop a method for learning policies that reduce tails of the cost distribution at a specified level and, moreover, provide a statistically valid bound on the cost of each decision. These properties are valid under finite samples -- even in scenarios with uneven or no overlap between features for different decisions in the observed data -- by building on recent results in conformal prediction. The performance and statistical properties of the proposed method are illustrated using both real and synthetic data.

We introduce a new dataset for multi-class emotion analysis from long-form narratives in English. The Dataset for Emotions of Narrative Sequences (DENS) was collected from both classic literature available on Project Gutenberg and modern online narratives available on Wattpad, annotated using Amazon Mechanical Turk. A number of statistics and baseline benchmarks are provided for the dataset. Of the tested techniques, we find that the fine-tuning of a pre-trained BERT model achieves the best results, with an average micro-F1 score of 60.4%. Our results show that the dataset provides a novel opportunity in emotion analysis that requires moving beyond existing sentence-level techniques., Comment: Accepted to EMNLP 2019

We study methods for learning sentence embeddings with syntactic structure. We focus on methods of learning syntactic sentence-embeddings by using a multilingual parallel-corpus augmented by Universal Parts-of-Speech tags. We evaluate the quality of the learned embeddings by examining sentence-level nearest neighbours and functional dissimilarity in the embedding space. We also evaluate the ability of the method to learn syntactic sentence-embeddings for low-resource languages and demonstrate strong evidence for transfer learning. Our results show that syntactic sentence-embeddings can be learned while using less training data, fewer model parameters, and resulting in better evaluation metrics than state-of-the-art language models.

We consider a general statistical learning problem where an unknown fraction of the training data is corrupted. We develop a robust learning method that only requires specifying an upper bound on the corrupted data fraction. The method minimizes a risk function defined by a non-parametric distribution with unknown probability weights. We derive and analyse the optimal weights and show how they provide robustness against corrupted data. Furthermore, we give a computationally efficient coordinate descent algorithm to solve the risk minimization problem. We demonstrate the wide range applicability of the method, including regression, classification, unsupervised learning and classic parameter estimation, with state-of-the-art performance.

We address the problem of inferring the causal effect of an exposure on an outcome across space, using observational data. The data is possibly subject to unmeasured confounding variables which, in a standard approach, must be adjusted for by estimating a nuisance function. Here we develop a method that eliminates the nuisance function, while mitigating the resulting errors-in-variables. The result is a robust and accurate inference method for spatially varying heterogeneous causal effects. The properties of the method are demonstrated on synthetic as well as real data from Germany and the US., Comment: 10 pages, 10 figures

We address the problem of predicting spatio-temporal processes with temporal patterns that vary across spatial regions, when data is obtained as a stream. That is, when the training dataset is augmented sequentially. Specifically, we develop a localized spatio-temporal covariance model of the process that can capture spatially varying temporal periodicities in the data. We then apply a covariance-fitting methodology to learn the model parameters which yields a predictor that can be updated sequentially with each new data point. The proposed method is evaluated using both synthetic and real climate data which demonstrate its ability to accurately predict data missing in spatial regions over time., Comment: 12 pages, 7 figures

This work details CipherGAN, an architecture inspired by CycleGAN used for inferring the underlying cipher mapping given banks of unpaired ciphertext and plaintext. We demonstrate that CipherGAN is capable of cracking language data enciphered using shift and Vigenere ciphers to a high degree of fidelity and for vocabularies much larger than previously achieved. We present how CycleGAN can be made compatible with discrete data and train in a stable way. We then prove that the technique used in CipherGAN avoids the common problem of uninformative discrimination associated with GANs applied to discrete data.