Due to the growing complexity and numerous manufacturing variation in safety-critical analog and mixed-signal (AMS) circuit design, rare failure detection in the high-dimensional variational space is one of the major challenges in AMS verification. Efficient AMS failure detection is very demanding with limited samples on account of high simulation and manufacturing cost. In this work, we combine a reversible network and a gating architecture to identify essential features from datasets and reduce feature dimension for fast failure detection. While reversible residual networks (RevNets) have been actively studied for its restoration ability from output to input without the loss of information, the gating network facilitates the RevNet to aim at effective dimension reduction. We incorporate the proposed reversible gating architecture into Bayesian optimization (BO) framework to reduce the dimensionality of BO embedding important features clarified by gating fusion weights so that the failure points can be efficiently located. Furthermore, we propose a conditional density estimation of important and non-important features to extract high-dimensional original input features from the low-dimension important features, improving the efficiency of the proposed methods. The improvements of our proposed approach on rare failure detection is demonstrated in AMS data under the high-dimensional process variations.

Collision avoidance is a key technology enabling applications such as autonomous vehicles and robots. Various reinforcement learning techniques such as the popular Q-learning algorithms have emerged as a promising solution for collision avoidance in robotics. While spiking neural networks (SNNs), the third generation model of neural networks, have gained increased interest due to their closer resemblance to biological neural circuits in the brain, the application of SNNs to mobile robot navigation has not been well studied. Under the context of reinforcement learning, this paper aims to investigate the potential of biologically-motivated spiking neural networks for goal-directed collision avoidance in reasonably complex environments. Unlike the existing additive reward-modulated spike-timing dependent plasticity learning rule (A-RM-STDP), for the first time, we explore a new multiplicative RM-STDP scheme (M-RM-STDP) for the targeted application. Furthermore, we propose a more biologically plausible feed-forward spiking neural network architecture with fine-grained global rewards. Finally, by combining the above two techniques we demonstrate a further improved solution to collision avoidance. Our proposed approaches not only completely outperform Q-learning for cases where Q-learning can hardly reach the target without collision, but also significantly outperform a baseline SNN with A-RM-STDP in terms of both success rate and the quality of navigation trajectories.