VLDB 2026 Research / reviewers in the wild / expert
Ali Aghdaei
dblp:210/3216
· DBLP profile ↗
7ranked-venue papers
3as first author
7since 2021 · last 2026
0000-0001-7903-5246ORCID · corroborated
Domains — the database's venue-derived domains; a paper can count in several
Systems, architecture and hardware · 7 · 3 first-author · 7 since 2021
| Year | Publication | Venue | Position |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2026 | SHyPar: A Spectral Coarsening Approach to Hypergraph PartitioningabstractState-of-the-art hypergraph partitioners utilize a multilevel paradigm to construct progressively coarser hypergraphs across multiple layers, guiding cut refinements at each level of the hierarchy. Traditionally, these partitioners employ heuristic methods for coarsening and do not consider the structural features of hypergraphs. In this work, we introduce a multilevel spectral framework, SHyPar, for partitioning large-scale hypergraphs by leveraging hyperedge effective resistances and flow-based community detection techniques. Inspired by the latest theoretical spectral clustering frameworks, such as HyperEF and HyperSF, SHyPar aims to decompose large hypergraphs into multiple subgraphs with few inter-partition hyperedges (cut size). A key component of SHyPar is a flow-based local clustering scheme for hypergraph coarsening, which incorporates a max-flow-based algorithm to produce clusters with substantially improved conductance. Additionally, SHyPar utilizes an effective resistance-based rating function for merging nodes that are strongly connected (coupled). Compared with existing state-of-the-art hypergraph partitioning methods, our extensive experimental results on real-world VLSI designs demonstrate that SHyPar can more effectively partition hypergraphs, achieving state-of-the-art solution quality. Hamed Sajadinia, Ali Aghdaei |
IEEE Trans. Comput. Aided Des. Integr. Circuits Syst. | 2 |
| 2025 | CirSTAG: Circuit Stability Analysis on Graph-based ManifoldsabstractCircuit stability (sensitivity) analysis aims to estimate the overall performance impact of variations in underlying design parameters, such as gate sizes and capacitance. This process is challenging because it often requires numerous time-consuming circuit simulations. In contrast, graph neural networks (GNNs) have shown remarkable effectiveness and efficiency in tackling several chip design automation issues, including circuit timing predictions, parasitic prediction, gate sizing, and device placement. This paper introduces a novel approach called CirSTAG, which utilizes GNNs to analyze the stability (robustness) of modern integrated circuits (ICs). CirSTAG is grounded in a spectral framework that examines the stability of GNNs by leveraging input/output graph-based manifolds. When two adjacent nodes on the input manifold are mapped (through a GNN model) to two remote nodes (data samples) on the output manifold, this indicates a significant mapping distortion (DMD) and consequently poor GNN stability. CirSTAG calculates a stability score equivalent to the local Lipschitz constant for each node and edge, considering both graph structure and node feature perturbations. This enables the identification of the most critical (sensitive) circuit elements that could significantly impact circuit performance. Our empirical evaluations across various timing prediction tasks with realistic circuit designs demonstrate that CirSTAG can accurately estimate the stability of each circuit element under diverse parameter variations. This offers a scalable method for assessing the stability of large integrated circuit designs. Wuxinlin Cheng, Yihang Yuan, Chenhui Deng, Ali Aghdaei, Zhiru Zhang |
DAC | 4 |
| 2025 | dyGRASS: Dynamic Spectral Graph Sparsification via Localized Random Walks on GPUsabstractThis work presents dyGRASS, an efficient dynamic algorithm for spectral sparsification of large undirected graphs that undergo streaming edge insertions and deletions. At its core, dyGRASS employs a random-walk-based method to efficiently estimate node-to-node distances in both the original graph (for decremental update) and its sparsifier (for incremental update). For incremental updates, dyGRASS enables the identification of spectrally critical edges among the updates to capture the latest structural changes. For decremental updates, dyGRASS facilitates the recovery of important edges from the original graph back into the sparsifier. To further enhance computational efficiency, dyGRASS employs a GPU-based non-backtracking random walk scheme that allows multiple walkers to operate simultaneously across various target updates. This parallelization significantly improves both the performance and scalability of the proposed dyGRASS framework. Our comprehensive experimental evaluations reveal that dyGRASS achieves approximately a 10× speedup compared to the state-of-the-art incremental sparsification (inGRASS) algorithm while eliminating the setup overhead and improving solution quality in incremental spectral sparsification tasks. Moreover, dyGRASS delivers high efficiency and superior solution quality for fully dynamic graph sparsification, accommodating both edge insertions and deletions across a diverse range of graph instances originating from integrated circuit simulations, finite element analysis, and social networks. We release our full implementation at: https://github.com/Feng-Research/dyGRASS Yihang Yuan, Ali Aghdaei |
ICCAD | 2 |
| 2024 | inGRASS: Incremental Graph Spectral Sparsification via Low-Resistance-Diameter DecompositionabstractThis work presents inGRASS, a novel algorithm designed for incremental spectral sparsification of large undirected graphs. The proposed inGRASS algorithm is highly scalable and parallel-friendly, having a nearly-linear time complexity for the setup phase and the ability to update the spectral sparsifier in O(logN) time for each incremental change made to the original graph with N nodes. A key component in the setup phase of inGRASS is a multilevel resistance embedding framework introduced for efficiently identifying spectrally-critical edges and effectively detecting redundant ones, which is achieved by decomposing the initial sparsifier into many node clusters with bounded effective-resistance diameters leveraging a low-resistance-diameter decomposition (LRD) scheme. The update phase of inGRASS exploits low-dimensional node embedding vectors for efficiently estimating the importance and uniqueness of each newly added edge. As demonstrated through extensive experiments, inGRASS achieves up to over 200× speedups while retaining comparable solution quality in incremental spectral sparsification of graphs obtained from various datasets, such as circuit simulations, finite element analysis, and social networks. Ali Aghdaei |
DAC | 1 |
| 2024 | SGM-PINN: Sampling Graphical Models for Faster Training of Physics-Informed Neural NetworksabstractSGM-PINN is a graph-based importance sampling framework to improve the training efficacy of Physics-Informed Neural Networks (PINNs) on parameterized problems. By applying a graph decomposition scheme to an undirected Probabilistic Graphical Model (PGM) built from the training dataset, our method generates node clusters encoding conditional dependence between training samples. Biasing sampling towards more important clusters allows smaller mini-batches and training datasets, improving training speed and accuracy. We additionally fuse an efficient robustness metric with residual losses to determine regions requiring additional sampling. Experiments demonstrate the advantages of the proposed framework, achieving 3× faster convergence compared to prior state-of-the-art sampling methods. John Anticev, Ali Aghdaei, Wuxinlin Cheng |
DAC | 2 |
| 2022 | HyperEF: Spectral Hypergraph Coarsening by Effective-Resistance ClusteringabstractThis paper introduces a scalable algorithmic framework (HyperEF) for spectral coarsening (decomposition) of large-scale hypergraphs by exploiting hyperedge effective resistances. Motivated by the latest theoretical framework for low-resistance-diameter decomposition of simple graphs, HyperEF aims at decomposing large hypergraphs into multiple node clusters with only a few inter-cluster hyperedges. The key component in HyperEF is a nearly-linear time algorithm for estimating hyperedge effective resistances, which allows incorporating the latest diffusion-based non-linear quadratic operators defined on hypergraphs. To achieve good runtime scalability, HyperEF searches within the Krylov subspace (or approximate eigensubspace) for identifying the nearly-optimal vectors for approximating the hyperedge effective resistances. In addition, a node weight propagation scheme for multilevel spectral hypergraph decomposition has been introduced for achieving even greater node coarsening ratios. When compared with state-of-the-art hypergraph partitioning (clustering) methods, extensive experiment results on real-world VLSI designs show that HyperEF can more effectively coarsen (decompose) hypergraphs without losing key structural (spectral) properties of the original hypergraphs, while achieving over 70× runtime speedups over hMetis and 20× speedups over HyperSF. Ali Aghdaei |
ICCAD | 1 |
| 2021 | HyperSF: Spectral Hypergraph Coarsening via Flow-based Local ClusteringabstractHypergraphs allow modeling problems with multiway high-order relationships. However, the computational cost of most existing hypergraph-based algorithms can be heavily dependent upon the input hypergraph sizes. To address the ever-increasing computational challenges, graph coarsening can be potentially applied for preprocessing a given hypergraph by aggressively aggregating its vertices (nodes). However, state-of-the-art hypergraph partitioning (clustering) methods that incorporate heuristic graph coarsening techniques are not optimized for preserving the structural (global) properties of hypergraphs. In this work, we propose an efficient spectral hypergraph coarsening scheme (HyperSF) for well preserving the original spectral (structural) properties of hypergraphs. Our approach leverages a recent strongly-local max-flow-based clustering algorithm for detecting the sets of hypergraph vertices that minimize ratio cut. To further improve the algorithm efficiency, we propose a divide-and-conquer scheme by leveraging spectral clustering of the bipartite graphs corresponding to the original hypergraphs. Our experimental results for a variety of hypergraphs extracted from real-world VLSI design benchmarks show that the proposed hypergraph coarsening algorithm can significantly improve the multi-way conductance of hypergraph clustering as well as runtime efficiency when compared with existing state-of-the-art algorithms. Ali Aghdaei |
ICCAD | 1 |