ChipGPT: How far are we from natural language hardware design

As large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT exhibited unprecedented machine intelligence, it also shows great performance in assisting hardware engineers to realize higher-efficiency logic design via natural language interaction. To estimate the potential of the hardware design process assisted by LLMs, this work attempts to demonstrate an automated design environment that explores LLMs to generate hardware logic designs from natural language specifications. To realize a more accessible and efficient chip development flow, we present a scalable four-stage zero-code logic design framework based on LLMs without retraining or finetuning. At first, the demo, ChipGPT, begins by generating prompts for the LLM, which then produces initial Verilog programs. Second, an output manager corrects and optimizes these programs before collecting them into the final design space. Eventually, ChipGPT will search through this space to select the optimal design under the target metrics. The evaluation sheds some light on whether LLMs can generate correct and complete hardware logic designs described by natural language for some specifications. It is shown that ChipGPT improves programmability, and controllability, and shows broader design optimization space compared to prior work and native LLMs alone.

Statistical Modeling of Soft Error Influence on Neural Networks

Soft errors in large VLSI circuits pose dramatic influence on computing- and memory-intensive neural network (NN) processing. Understanding the influence of soft errors on NNs is critical to protect against soft errors for reliable NN processing. Prior work mainly rely on fault simulation to analyze the influence of soft errors on NN processing. They are accurate but usually specific to limited configurations of errors and NN models due to the prohibitively slow simulation speed especially for large NN models and datasets. With the observation that the influence of soft errors propagates across a large number of neurons and accumulates as well, we propose to characterize the soft error induced data disturbance on each neuron with normal distribution model according to central limit theorem and develop a series of statistical models to analyze the behavior of NN models under soft errors in general. The statistical models reveal not only the correlation between soft errors and NN model accuracy, but also how NN parameters such as quantization and architecture affect the reliability of NNs. The proposed models are compared with fault simulation and verified comprehensively. In addition, we observe that the statistical models that characterize the soft error influence can also be utilized to predict fault simulation results in many cases and we explore the use of the proposed statistical models to accelerate fault simulations of NNs. According to our experiments, the accelerated fault simulation shows almost two orders of magnitude speedup with negligible simulation accuracy loss over the baseline fault simulations.

Weight-based Channel-model Matrix Framework: a reasonable solution for EEG-based cross-dataset emotion recognition

Cross-dataset emotion recognition as an extremely challenging task in the field of EEG-based affective computing is influenced by many factors, which make the universal models yield unsatisfactory results. Facing the situation that lack of EEG information decoding researches, we first analyzed the impact of different EEG information(individual, session, emotion, trial) to emotion recognition by sample space visualization, sample aggregation phenomenon quantification, and energy pattern analysis on five public datasets. And based on these phenomena and patterns, we provided the processing methods and interpretable work of various EEG differences. Through the analysis of emotional feature distribution patterns, Individual Emotional Feature Distribution Difference(IEFDD) was found. After analyzing the limitations of traditional modeling approach suffering from IEFDD, we proposed the Weight-based Channel-model Matrix Framework(WCMF). In order to characterize emotional feature distribution patterns reasonably, four weight extraction methods were designed, and the optimal of them is Correction T-test(CT) weight extraction method. Finally, the performance of WCMF was validated on cross-dataset tasks in two kinds of experiments that simulated different practical scenarios, the results showed WCMF had more stable and better emotion recognition ability.

Breaking the accuracy and resolution limitation of filter- and frequency-to-time mapping-based time and frequency acquisition methods by broadening the filter bandwidth

In this paper, the filter- and frequency-to-time mapping (FTTM)-based photonics-assisted time and frequency acquisition methods are comprehensively analyzed and the accuracy and resolution limitation in the fast sweep scenario is broken by broadening the filter bandwidth. It is found that when the sweep speed is very fast, the width of the generated pulse via FTTM is mainly determined by the impulse response of the filter. In this case, appropriately increasing the filter bandwidth can significantly reduce the pulse width, so as to improve the measurement accuracy and resolution. FTTM-based short-time Fourier transform (STFT) and microwave frequency measurement using the stimulated Brillouin scattering (SBS) effect is demonstrated by comparing the results with and without SBS gain spectrum broadening and the improvement of measurement accuracy and frequency resolution is well confirmed. The frequency measurement accuracy of the system is improved by around 25 times compared with the former work using a similar sweep speed, while the frequency resolution of the STFT is also much improved compared with our former results.

Fault-Tolerant Deep Learning: A Hierarchical Perspective

With the rapid advancements of deep learning in the past decade, it can be foreseen that deep learning will be continuously deployed in more and more safety-critical applications such as autonomous driving and robotics. In this context, reliability turns out to be critical to the deployment of deep learning in these applications and gradually becomes a first-class citizen among the major design metrics like performance and energy efficiency. Nevertheless, the back-box deep learning models combined with the diverse underlying hardware faults make resilient deep learning extremely challenging. In this special session, we conduct a comprehensive survey of fault-tolerant deep learning design approaches with a hierarchical perspective and investigate these approaches from model layer, architecture layer, circuit layer, and cross layer respectively.

R2F: A Remote Retraining Framework for AIoT Processors with Computing Errors

AIoT processors fabricated with newer technology nodes suffer rising soft errors due to the shrinking transistor sizes and lower power supply. Soft errors on the AIoT processors particularly the deep learning accelerators (DLAs) with massive computing may cause substantial computing errors. These computing errors are difficult to be captured by the conventional training on general purposed processors like CPUs and GPUs in a server. Applying the offline trained neural network models to the edge accelerators with errors directly may lead to considerable prediction accuracy loss. To address the problem, we propose a remote retraining framework (R2F) for remote AIoT processors with computing errors. It takes the remote AIoT processor with soft errors in the training loop such that the on-site computing errors can be learned with the application data on the server and the retrained models can be resilient to the soft errors. Meanwhile, we propose an optimized partial TMR strategy to enhance the retraining. According to our experiments, R2F enables elastic design trade-offs between the model accuracy and the performance penalty. The top-5 model accuracy can be improved by 1.93%-13.73% with 0%-200% performance penalty at high fault error rate. In addition, we notice that the retraining requires massive data transmission and even dominates the training time, and propose a sparse increment compression approach for the data transmission optimization, which reduces the retraining time by 38%-88% on average with negligible accuracy loss over a straightforward remote retraining.

MODMA dataset: a Multi-modal Open Dataset for Mental-disorder Analysis

According to the World Health Organization, the number of mental disorder patients, especially depression patients, has grown rapidly and become a leading contributor to the global burden of disease. However, the present common practice of depression diagnosis is based on interviews and clinical scales carried out by doctors, which is not only labor-consuming but also time-consuming. One important reason is due to the lack of physiological indicators for mental disorders. With the rising of tools such as data mining and artificial intelligence, using physiological data to explore new possible physiological indicators of mental disorder and creating new applications for mental disorder diagnosis has become a new research hot topic. However, good quality physiological data for mental disorder patients are hard to acquire. We present a multi-modal open dataset for mental-disorder analysis. The dataset includes EEG and audio data from clinically depressed patients and matching normal controls. All our patients were carefully diagnosed and selected by professional psychiatrists in hospitals. The EEG dataset includes not only data collected using traditional 128-electrodes mounted elastic cap, but also a novel wearable 3-electrode EEG collector for pervasive applications. The 128-electrodes EEG signals of 53 subjects were recorded as both in resting state and under stimulation; the 3-electrode EEG signals of 55 subjects were recorded in resting state; the audio data of 52 subjects were recorded during interviewing, reading, and picture description. We encourage other researchers in the field to use it for testing their methods of mental-disorder analysis.

Exploring Spatial-Temporal Multi-Frequency Analysis for High-Fidelity and Temporal-Consistency Video Prediction

Video prediction is a pixel-wise dense prediction task to infer future frames based on past frames. Missing appearance details and motion blur are still two major problems for current predictive models, which lead to image distortion and temporal inconsistency. In this paper, we point out the necessity of exploring multi-frequency analysis to deal with the two problems. Inspired by the frequency band decomposition characteristic of Human Vision System (HVS), we propose a video prediction network based on multi-level wavelet analysis to deal with spatial and temporal information in a unified manner. Specifically, the multi-level spatial discrete wavelet transform decomposes each video frame into anisotropic sub-bands with multiple frequencies, helping to enrich structural information and reserve fine details. On the other hand, multi-level temporal discrete wavelet transform which operates on time axis decomposes the frame sequence into sub-band groups of different frequencies to accurately capture multi-frequency motions under a fixed frame rate. Extensive experiments on diverse datasets demonstrate that our model shows significant improvements on fidelity and temporal consistency over state-of-the-art works.

A study of resting-state EEG biomarkers for depression recognition

Background: Depression has become a major health burden worldwide, and effective detection depression is a great public-health challenge. This Electroencephalography (EEG)-based research is to explore the effective biomarkers for depression recognition. Methods: Resting state EEG data was collected from 24 major depressive patients (MDD) and 29 normal controls using 128 channel HydroCel Geodesic Sensor Net (HCGSN). To better identify depression, we extracted different types of EEG features including linear features, nonlinear features and functional connectivity features phase lagging index (PLI) to comprehensively analyze the EEG signals in patients with MDD. And using different feature selection methods and classifiers to evaluate the optimal feature sets. Results: Functional connectivity feature PLI is superior to the linear features and nonlinear features. And when combining all the types of features to classify MDD patients, we can obtain the highest classification accuracy 82.31% using ReliefF feature selection method and logistic regression (LR) classifier. Analyzing the distribution of optimal feature set, it was found that intrahemispheric connection edges of PLI were much more than the interhemispheric connection edges, and the intrahemispheric connection edges had a significant differences between two groups. Conclusion: Functional connectivity feature PLI plays an important role in depression recognition. Especially, intrahemispheric connection edges of PLI might be an effective biomarker to identify depression. And statistic results suggested that MDD patients might exist functional dysfunction in left hemisphere.