Axel Sauer

dblp:02/7122 · DBLP profile ↗
← Back
11ranked-venue papers
6as first author
10since 2021 · last 2025
0000-0002-3140-5743ORCID · corroborated

Domains — the database's venue-derived domains; a paper can count in several

Artificial intelligence and machine learning · 7 · 5 first-author · 6 since 2021Systems, architecture and hardware · 3 · 3 since 2021Graphics, computer vision, multimedia, augmented reality and games · 3 · 3 first-author · 2 since 2021Software engineering, systems software and programming languages · 2 · 2 since 2021Human-computer interaction and ubiquitous computing · 1 · 1 first-author · 1 since 2021
YearPublicationVenuePosition
2025 Multi-Partner Project: Advancing the EDA Tools Landscape for the European RISC-V Ecosystem in TRISTAN
abstract
The TRISTAN project aims to expand and industrialize the European RISC-V ecosystem to compete effectively with existing commercial alternatives. This initiative specifically targets the critical challenges in the development of Electronic Design Automation (EDA) tools, essential for RISC-V-based solutions, by leveraging the synergy between the open-source community and industrial solutions. This paper presents an overview of the current landscape of TRISTAN's EDA flow, highlighting specific tools and methodologies that streamline the early design phases of RISC-V-based systems. We explore the unique features of these tools, emphasizing how they complement each other to strengthen the overall design process.
Fatma Jebali, Caaliph Andriamisaina, Mathieu Jan, Wolfgang Ecker, Florian Egert, Bernhard Fischer, Alessio Burrello, Daniele Jahier Pagliari, Sara Vinco, Giuseppe Tagliavini, Ingo Feldner, Andreas Mauderer, Axel Sauer, Arnór Kristmundsson, Alexander Schober, Téo Bernier, Matti Käyrä, Ulf Schlichtmann, Rocco Jonack
DATE13
2025 Invited Paper: Rapid Performance Evaluation and Optimized AI Inference for Heterogeneous Automotive Chiplets
abstract
The evolution towards software-defined vehicles and the intense computational demands of artificial intelligence (AI) are driving the automotive industry to adopt heterogeneous, chiplet-based compute architectures. This paradigm shift is propelled by the need for scalable performance across vehicle models, faster innovation cycles, and cost-effective integration of specialized functions. While this approach offers significant design flexibility, it introduces two fundamental challenges: 1) the complex and time-consuming task of evaluating the performance of countless possible chiplet configurations, and 2) the need to efficiently map and optimize AI inference workloads onto diverse hardware accelerators. This paper addresses both issues. We first detail the requirements for a rapid simulation methodology, emphasizing the need for an open, unified application programming interface (API) that allows for interchangeable hardware models from various vendors. We then demonstrate a hardware-aware AI inference optimization toolchain capable of targeting a wide range of accelerators, ensuring workload portability and performance. By combining these methodologies for rapid evaluation and targeted optimization, we establish a critical pathway for realizing the full potential of high-performance chiplet systems in next-generation vehicles.
Christoph Schorn, Axel Sauer, Marius Fischer, Ingo Feldner, Thomas Schamm, Falk Rehm
ICCAD2
2024 A Scalable RISC-V Hardware Platform for Intelligent Sensor Processing
abstract
This paper presents a demonstrator chip for an industrial audio event detection application developed as part of the Scale4Edge project. The project aims at enabling a comprehensive RISC-V based ecosystem to efficiently assemble well-tailored edge devices. The chip is manufactured in Globalfoundries' 22FDX technology and contains a RISC-V CPU with custom Instruction-Set-Architecture Extensions (ISAX) for fast AI and DSP processing, a low power neural network accelerator, and a scalable PLL to fulfill real-time processing requirements. By automated integration of these specialized hardware components, we achieve a speedup of ×2.15 while reducing the power by 27% compared to the unp[ntimized solution.
Paul Palomero Bernardo, Patrick Schmid, Oliver Bringmann 0001, Mohammed Iftekhar, Babak Sadiye, Wolfgang Müller 0003, Andreas Koch 0001, Eyck Jentzsch, Axel Sauer, Ingo Feldner, Wolfgang Ecker
DATE9
2024 Adversarial Diffusion Distillation
Axel Sauer, Dominik Lorenz, Andreas Blattmann, Robin Rombach
ECCV (86)1
2024 Scaling Rectified Flow Transformers for High-Resolution Image Synthesis
abstract
Diffusion models create data from noise by inverting the forward paths of data towards noise and have emerged as a powerful generative modeling technique for high-dimensional, perceptual data such as images and videos. Rectified flow is a recent generative model formulation that connects data and noise in a straight line. Despite its better theoretical properties and conceptual simplicity, it is not yet decisively established as standard practice. In this work, we improve existing noise sampling techniques for training rectified flow models by biasing them towards perceptually relevant scales. Through a large-scale study, we demonstrate the superior performance of this approach compared to established diffusion formulations for high-resolution text-to-image synthesis. Additionally, we present a novel transformer-based architecture for text-to-image generation that uses separate weights for the two modalities and enables a bidirectional flow of information between image and text tokens, improving text comprehension, typography, and human preference ratings. We demonstrate that this architecture follows predictable scaling trends and correlates lower validation loss to improved text-to-image synthesis as measured by various metrics and human evaluations. Our largest models outperform state-of-the-art models. Stability AI is considering making experimental data, code, and model weights publicly available.
Patrick Esser, Sumith Kulal, Andreas Blattmann, Rahim Entezari, Harry Saini, Yam Levi, Dominik Lorenz, Axel Sauer, Frederic Boesel, Dustin Podell, Tim Dockhorn, Zion English, Robin Rombach
ICML9
2024 Fast High-Resolution Image Synthesis with Latent Adversarial Diffusion Distillation
Axel Sauer, Frederic Boesel, Tim Dockhorn, Andreas Blattmann, Patrick Esser, Robin Rombach
SIGGRAPH Asia1
2023 StyleGAN-T: Unlocking the Power of GANs for Fast Large-Scale Text-to-Image Synthesis
abstract
Text-to-image synthesis has recently seen significant progress thanks to large pretrained language models, large-scale training data, and the introduction of scalable model families such as diffusion and autoregressive models. However, the best-performing models require iterative evaluation to generate a single sample. In contrast, generative adversarial networks (GANs) only need a single forward pass. They are thus much faster, but they currently remain far behind the state-of-the-art in large-scale text-to-image synthesis. This paper aims to identify the necessary steps to regain competitiveness. Our proposed model, StyleGAN-T, addresses the specific requirements of large-scale text-to-image synthesis, such as large capacity, stable training on diverse datasets, strong text alignment, and controllable variation vs. text alignment tradeoff. StyleGAN-T significantly improves over previous GANs and outperforms distilled diffusion models - the previous state-of-the-art in fast text-to-image synthesis - in terms of sample quality and speed.
Axel Sauer, Tero Karras, Samuli Laine, Andreas Geiger 0001, Timo Aila
ICML1
2022 VoxGRAF: Fast 3D-Aware Image Synthesis with Sparse Voxel Grids
abstract
State-of-the-art 3D-aware generative models rely on coordinate-based MLPs to parameterize 3D radiance fields. While demonstrating impressive results, querying an MLP for every sample along each ray leads to slow rendering.Therefore, existing approaches often render low-resolution feature maps and process them with an upsampling network to obtain the final image. Albeit efficient, neural rendering often entangles viewpoint and content such that changing the camera pose results in unwanted changes of geometry or appearance.Motivated by recent results in voxel-based novel view synthesis, we investigate the utility of sparse voxel grid representations for fast and 3D-consistent generative modeling in this paper.Our results demonstrate that monolithic MLPs can indeed be replaced by 3D convolutions when combining sparse voxel grids with progressive growing, free space pruning and appropriate regularization.To obtain a compact representation of the scene and allow for scaling to higher voxel resolutions, our model disentangles the foreground object (modeled in 3D) from the background (modeled in 2D).In contrast to existing approaches, our method requires only a single forward pass to generate a full 3D scene. It hence allows for efficient rendering from arbitrary viewpoints while yielding 3D consistent results with high visual fidelity. Code and models are available at https://github.com/autonomousvision/voxgraf.
Katja Schwarz, Axel Sauer, Michael Niemeyer, Yiyi Liao, Andreas Geiger 0001
NeurIPS2
2021 Counterfactual Generative Networks
Axel Sauer, Andreas Geiger 0001
ICLR1
2021 Projected GANs Converge Faster
abstract
Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) produce high-quality images but are challenging to train. They need careful regularization, vast amounts of compute, and expensive hyper-parameter sweeps. We make significant headway on these issues by projecting generated and real samples into a fixed, pretrained feature space. Motivated by the finding that the discriminator cannot fully exploit features from deeper layers of the pretrained model, we propose a more effective strategy that mixes features across channels and resolutions. Our Projected GAN improves image quality, sample efficiency, and convergence speed. It is further compatible with resolutions of up to one Megapixel and advances the state-of-the-art Fréchet Inception Distance (FID) on twenty-two benchmark datasets. Importantly, Projected GANs match the previously lowest FIDs up to 40 times faster, cutting the wall-clock time from 5 days to less than 3 hours given the same computational resources.
Axel Sauer, Kashyap Chitta, Andreas Geiger 0001
NeurIPS1
2019 Tracking Holistic Object Representations
Axel Sauer, Elie Aljalbout, Sami Haddadin
BMVC1